


No Man Is an Island

by Carlough



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-11 22:54:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 58,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12945777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carlough/pseuds/Carlough
Summary: Hoosier didn't get attached easily, but getting attached to humans wasn't a good idea for a werewolf anyway.  But he can't imagine not doing anything in his power to protect his friends, to give them a better chance at surviving this war.  He was going to save their miserable lives, and damn the consequences.He should have given it more thought though, because now they’re all tied to each other forever, through instincts and injury, war and separation, and whatever comes next. Together, they’re all going to learn what it means to be a pack - whether they like it or not.





	No Man Is an Island

**Author's Note:**

> I've had the first few pages of this sitting in my drafts for literal years, so thank you so much to the mods for setting all of this up and giving me the excuse I needed to finally make myself finish this. My endless thanks to scramjets (uniformly) for the beta and for always being there when I had emergency history questions ("quick but where WAS H Company located during that battle??") or just letting me bounce endless ideas off of you; this probably never would have gotten off the ground without your help.
> 
> The [wonderful fanmix](http://aasimarr.tumblr.com/post/168390882287) is by aasimarr (apear55) and you all should go listen to those songs while reading this fic because they fit it so well. The title of this fic is pulled from one of the songs, Black Flies by Ben Howard.
> 
> Warnings for canon-levels of violence and detailed descriptions of gore, as well as for canon-era racism and racist slurs. This pretty closely follows canon and some lines of dialogue are pulled directly from canon; if it sounds familiar, it probably is.

Fanmix by apear55 - [Listen Here](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Fuser%2F1244621914%2Fplaylist%2F4oCUZZvELknagnDYKUQk0v&t=MTYzZjgwOGMyYzYzMzQ5NjNmNjAwNDA0YTE1MTFmMDczYjhmZWI3ZixnYnBoc1NQRQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AZNKjEt1E_sA_vKDUIcYSRg&p=http%3A%2F%2Faasimarr.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168390882287%2Fpacific-big-bang-2017-no-man-is-an-island-by&m=0)

~~~

Bill Smith's mother never explicitly told him that he shouldn't try to start his own pack when he went off to war. In her defense, she probably didn't think she had to. She had felt confident that after everything she and her husband had taught their son over the years, he would have the common sense to understand why that could be a catastrophic idea.

She was wrong. She knew when he came back from those mythical tropical lands of mosquitoes and names nobody could pronounce that the bags under his eyes and tremors in his hands had nothing to do with what he had seen there and everything to do with what he had done.

Not what he had done with a gun in his hands – that was different. She could see  _that_  in the dark, haunted look in his eyes, the listless chain smoking, in the way that he refused to go to church because it was "no place for men like him."

No, the wistful, longing stares and the hand that would unconsciously reach out to grasp at empty space, the question half-posed on his lips until he would come back to himself and realize that the intended recipient was thousands of miles away, maybe back in a muddy half-exposed grave in the torrential downpours of the Pacific –  _those_  were the moments that told her everything she needed to know about how she had done poorly by her son in her failure to educate him better before he left for war.

Mrs. Smith hadn't thought that she had to tell her son not to start his own pack when he went off to war. She hadn't told him that a pack was forever and should not be started with only the immediate future in mind. She hadn't told him about the duty that an alpha had to look after their pack, to teach them their ways, how they would feel responsible for every pack member's wellbeing and happiness. She hadn't told him how hard that would be to maintain in a combat situation, where life was miserable by nature and people could be removed from your pack in a moment's notice due to the caprices of war and the military.

She hadn't told him that in a best-case scenario, his pack would be separated after the war by the logistic nightmares of familial duties and geographic distance. She hadn't told him that at the worst he could lose each and every member of his pack to an unmarked grave on an island he couldn't name, and that the true horror of it would be that he had to return home to his family with the knowledge that he had failed every single person who was relying on him to take care of them.

She hadn't told him about what would happen to his pack if he were to be the one who left first.

Bill Smith's mother didn't tell him any of those things, because she didn't think she would have to. Somehow, she had assumed that her son would know better, after years of training him to be her successor. She thought he would know how to protect himself from that sort of heartache.

And maybe Bill Smith  _had_  known all of that, at some point when he kissed her goodbye and shook his father's hand and shipped out for boot camp. But what Mrs. Smith didn't know was that at a certain point in time Bill Smith's education and pragmatism had fallen to the background in the face of Hoosier's smirks and crude jokes and fierce protectiveness for his newfound friends who were so painfully fragile and human. And she didn't know that it had only taken one night on Guadalcanal for Hoosier to decide that he would do everything within his power to make sure that those fucked up idiots he called his friends would have every possible advantage to help them get home in one piece, whether they wanted it or not.

No, Mrs. Smith didn't know any of that, and she never would learn all of it.

But when her son came home and sat in her kitchen, hands wrapped around a chipped mug with his shoulders hunched like somebody might try to take it away and said, "Ma, I screwed up" – that told her more than journals full of letters ever could.

She sat down across from him with a sigh that belied all of the years of worry and exhaustion that she had never let herself show while her son was overseas.

There was really only one important thing to know.

"Do you regret it?"

He shook his head immediately, mouth pressed into a tight grimace and his eyes trained on his rapidly cooling coffee. "No. Never."

Mrs. Smith nodded if only to herself and placed a hand over one of his son's, still wrapped around the mug.

"Then it's not a mistake. And if it's not a mistake, then there's nothing to be sorry for."

He looked up at her now, with that faraway look and the grey smudges under his eyes and he said, "There's so much to be sorry for."

She braced herself and asked, "Are they dead?"

His fingers flexed tightly around the mug, turning nearly as white as the porcelain, but the shake of his head was severe. "No."

She relaxed and patted his hand again. "Then we can fix this. Tell me about them."

Bill Smith was not the talking type, at least not when it had anything remotely to do with his feelings. She supposed he took after his father that way. But it only took one look to quash any protests he might have proposed, as he bristled and slumped in defeat all in the same motion.

"The first one was Leckie," he said, a hand rising up to fidget with a cigarette he didn't have; Mrs. Smith did not allow smoking inside her house, from anyone. "We met before we shipped out, but I wasn't thinking of doing anything then..."

~~~

The first one was Leckie, but Hoosier never would have dreamed of changing anyone into a werewolf when he met Leckie, because Hoosier had thought that Leckie was something of a prick.

Robert Leckie was the type who seemed born with a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he was, with that many siblings. It was as if he came out of the womb with a skeptical expression already in place and an inbred hatred for any type of authority. Hoosier, who had been selected entirely at random as a runner for the company captain at New River, was automatically viewed as a representation of that authority just by nature of his position. The surliness of his expression or the amount of mud on his uniform didn't matter. Considering that the Marines could not yet have done much to earn Leckie's ire, aside from a lack of liberty passes and teaching him a new and improved definition of the word "discipline," Hoosier was left to conclude that Leckie had no reason to be such an ass towards him aside from the fact that he was, in fact, an ass.

Hoosier, for his part, did not react much more positively to Leckie, but something must be said for like drawing to like, because it was not long until they were thick as thieves, the two jokesters of the platoon, mocking the brass and just about every convention the Marines had to offer.

(It could not be said that Hoosier himself did not have something of a dislike for authority figures. It also could not be said that Hoosier wasn't something of a hypocrite. He would openly admit to either accusation, but would not realize the full ramifications of such concepts for some time.)

Chuckler and Runner seemed to follow one after another, together as they were in so many things. Chuckler was Leckie's friend first, the other half of a two-man machine gun team, but in the way that friendships go among men with too much time on their hands at a training camp in the middle of nowhere, soon he was Hoosier's friend as well. Runner came along soon after, following where Chuckler led, which Hoosier would soon recognize as a trend.

From the time they met, the four became inseparable, spending their evenings huddled up together with whatever stolen booze they'd managed to scrounge up, and Hoosier woke up one morning to realize that he had friends. Not just any friends, but good friends. Best friends, even.

Human friends.

Werewolves, as a rule, did not make a lot of human friends. It was not by any means a taboo to associate with humans, or to even befriend them, but there were implicit social rules to being a werewolf that one picked up on over time. Given the explicit rule that one must never reveal their secret to a human, it naturally followed implicitly that it was a poor idea to befriend a human, because a friend with whom one could not be genuine and honest was not much of a friend at all.

Humans could be neighbors and coworkers, schoolmates and little league teammates, but they weren't family, and they weren't friends.

Well, not unless you planned to make them so, on a rather permanent basis.

Hoosier was not one for the level of commitment connotated by permanency, nor for the social effort that it took to balance between being friendly to a human while playing your cards close to your chest. This meant that he grew up as a child with more friendly acquaintances than actual friends.

"You can play with the other children in the pack," his mother had always offered encouragingly.

As she was the pack alpha, there were always wolves of all ages trailing around their property. Some of them worked on the Smith family farm and others were just looking for companionship with their own kind. Hoosier's mother always tried to nudge him towards the other children his age, particularly at pack gatherings when pups could always be seen scuffling with each other in the dirt and nipping at each other's tails.

Hoosier, contrary as ever, had always turned up his nose at his other packmates, and instead pointed it in the direction of a dog.

Dogs were naturally drawn to werewolves. Some proposed that it was an effect of their acknowledged role in the predatory pecking order, recognizing werewolves as their superiors both as humans and wolves and attempting to appease them in order to gain protection. Others suggested that dogs simply found comfort in a human alpha could understand them on an instinctual level. Whatever the reason, it meant that where a pack of wolves went, stray dogs were sure to follow.

And Hoosier, for one, was a fan of this quirk of nature. His mother had always had an affection for dogs, taking care of whichever mongrel happened to wander on to her property, and her son was all too eager to join in. Dogs were much easier than humans, or even other wolves. You didn't need to hide yourself from a dog, because they liked you for who you were. They didn't care if you could turn into a wolf – in fact, they probably liked you better for it. And they certainly didn't pretend to like you because they wanted to get in good with the alpha through her son.

Dogs always came at you with clear hearts and intentions. Hoosier much preferred them to any other people his age, human or otherwise.

But in the Marines, it wasn't exactly that easy to run off to play with stray dogs, and certainly not to do so in the form of a wolf. It also wasn't easy to stay by yourself, if you wanted to survive for very long – the loneliness would kill you all by itself, if not a stray bullet.

But it was so, so easy to make friends with humans - or at least, it was easy to make friends with these three humans in particular. He couldn't say what it was that made him like them. Maybe it was the proximity. Maybe it was because they liked him first. Maybe it was because they wanted to be his friend without having a clue who he really was.

Hoosier was not experienced in having human friends, or really any friends at all, and at times considered that maybe he was simply not very discerning, to have so easily settled on these three humans, and so quickly at that. But he spent plenty of time with other Marines, and while he liked most of them just fine – or at least, didn't actively dislike them or wish them ill will – there were none that he liked more than  _his_  three Marines.

His friends.

It was a novel concept. After years of avoiding just about everyone of the two-legged persuasion who tried to befriend him – some to avoid having to keep secrets and others to avoid a game of social politics – it was disconcerting to find himself so quickly attached to three people who smiled at him like they knew him – and he  _wanted_  them to know him, so badly, wanted them to recognize him for who he really was and still be smiling at him on the other side.

He thought about pushing them away like he always had the kids in school, keeping them at arm's length, but the notion of being alone – utterly alone, without anyone to call his own, was too difficult, his heart beating erratically just at the thought of it.

Wolves were not meant to be alone. They functioned in packs for a reason: a lone wolf never survived long on their own, and those few that did...there was always something  _off_  about them, afterwards. Something changed that could not be fixed.

Hoosier had seen them wander through his mother's territory, aimless drifters, skittish of other wolves or all too dangerously bold. They didn't know how to be around others anymore, too many years left stuck in their own heads without anyone to care for them – without anyone to care  _for_.

Hoosier may not have been close with his other packmates or had many real friends, but he'd always had his parents, and his relatives, and his many, many dogs. He had never been truly, honestly alone before.

And really, why try to fight it? Hoosier enjoyed being contrary, particularly when it suited his needs, but he was also one who appreciated the benefits of taking the path of least resistance. If the Marines wanted to provide him with a ready-made pack environment of close-quarters and camaraderie, and if something in his strange little heart really liked these three Marines in particular, human though they may be – well, why not? Why not be their friend?

The worst that could happen was that they all died, but then again, humans died all the time. May as well enjoy them while they lasted, right?

It was months later, on a backwoods island in the middle of the Pacific called what-the-fuck-rhymes-with-Guadalcanal, when Hoosier would finally realize just how naive he'd been.

Because one thing that Hoosier had never realized in his lifetime of lukewarm acquaintances was that wolves form attachments quickly, and once they made a friend – once they claimed them as their own – well.

They never let them go.

~~~

Nobody could remember exactly when Phillips and Gibson fell in with their group. It was as if one day they were four, and the next they were – well, not maybe quite six, but more.

Phillips stuck to them hard and fast, like a young pup attaching itself to one of the taller, ganglier adolescents, someone to look after it and help it hunt and protect it from those who could take advantage of it. And looking at Phillips's face, his bright, eager eyes and his cheeks still round with puppy fat, it wasn't a hard connection to make.

Gibson was the same, and Gibson was different. He was just as likely to spend time with their group as he was to hang out with someone else, and that on its own would not have made him odd: there were plenty of men who were on good terms with everybody or who orbited their group, but never felt the need to ingratiate themselves. Gibson wanted to be close, Gibson often  _was_  close, and Hoosier could tell that the others were genuinely fond of him. He was their buddy – they'd look out for him in a fight, include him if they had some scheme going on (usually related to acquiring more ill-gotten liquor).

But he was never accepted as quickly as Phillips, nor as easily. At least not by Hoosier. Maybe it was his inexperience with friends, or his over-experience with acquaintances, but something instinctual curled deep in his chest could not abide by a friend who could just as easily be there as they could choose to be elsewhere, with others. That was not how a  _packmate_  would behave.

Hoosier could not keep the others from befriending him, nor would he try – they were not wolves, after all, and had much different standards for friendship, and it wasn't like Gibson behaved any differently than scores of other men who didn't seem to get Hoosier's hackles up nearly as much. He couldn't put his misgivings into words, and so there was no way that he could imagine voicing them, even if they did make sense to someone with no concept of pack.

And so instead he chose to sit back, and to watch.

They were on a ship en route to some tropical island that nobody had ever heard of before, but one that the Japs knew intimately well, and he figured that once they finally got off of this godforsaken ship and saw some real action, he wouldn't have to spend so much time worrying about such frivolous concepts as pack and friendship.

~~~

He was wrong. He was so, so wrong.

Guadalcanal was at first a disappointment: so much anticipation, guns clutched tightly to chests, planes roaring overhead towards the inland, last prayers sent to the sky along with them, and then, nothing but a beach strewn with lounging, catcalling Marines and thousands of allegedly poisoned coconuts.

The trek through the jungle had been nerve-wracking and yet surreal, perhaps more so for Hoosier than any other Marine because he was the only one who could recognize when a branch had been broken by an animal and not the enemy creeping through the brush.

It was like a strange, almost abstract thought, to realize that the wildlife on this island, so foreign and exotic and so very very  _far_  from everything that he'd ever called home, was yet so similar to what he'd known. The birds made different calls, but they behaved like birds,  _sounded_  like birds, fluttering in the bushes, swooping through the leaves overhead. The rodents scurrying through the underbrush may not have always looked exactly like the ones in Indiana, but they smelled similar, moved in the same ways. The sights and sounds and smells of Guadalcanal were brand new and yet, like all nature, the same in the end.

But Hoosier couldn't explain why he was the only one who knew without a doubt that the sounds they heard weren't approaching Japs, that they weren't walking into an ambush because that was a obviously a bird picking around in the leaves and not a Jap moving for cover, and so he had to flinch and freeze and glance around along with everyone else.

Well, it wasn't like extra caution would hurt anybody. Getting into the habit of being careful could only help them all in the long-run.

He had to put a stop to it though, when they saw the glowing lights on the river at night and everyone lost their goddamned minds.

"It's a fucking crocodile!" he hissed, and somehow the word went up and down the line with much more speed than he ever would have anticipated, shots dying down within moments. Better to risk a crocodile getting hungry than waste ammo making sure the enemy knew exactly where they were.

"How the hell did you know that?" Runner asked, elbowing him none-too-gently in the side.

Hoosier shrugged, knowing he couldn't be seen in the darkness anyway.

"Saw 'em in a magazine once," he mumbled, as if that was all of the explanation he needed. It was as much as he was planning to give, and it was, to a certain degree, truthful. He  _had_  learned about crocodiles in a magazine once, just enough to know that they were bigger than the alligators that prowled the swamps of the southern states. Bigger, and probably meaner, too. Christ only knew, Hoosier didn't know the difference. He'd never seen either before in his life.

But he'd been able to hear it, gliding through the water, only its eyes and muzzle making gentle waves as it moved across the surface. And Lord knows he could smell it, the scent of salt and fish and decaying meat – a wolf always knew another predator, even one it had never met before. He'd yet to encounter any Japanese soldiers, but he doubted they'd smell like that. He knew whatever was in that water was big, and dangerous, but it certainly wasn't human, and it wasn't worth everyone shitting themselves and wasting their ammunition. And therefore, given what little he knew, he'd made an educated guess: crocodile.

He'd been right about those lights on the water. The Japs weren't kind enough – or dumb enough – to give that kind of warning. There was the sound of snapping twigs, too loud for any of the small animals he'd encountered so far, too deliberate in its motions.

And then the world exploded.

No amount of training and war games could have prepared him for the assault, not only on their physical bodies, but on his senses.

The air was thick with smoke and gunpowder, tracers lighting up the night sky, bullets whizzing by like so many flying insects, the  _thunk_  and ensuing concussion of the mortar shells, the cacophony of lights and sounds, shouts of fear and pain and urgency, and within it all, he was expected to keep shooting. Keep your head down and  _keep shooting_ , the ground was shaking and the Japs were flanking them and they needed to  _move_  and they needed to  _keep shooting_  and people were falling, screaming, who was screaming, he knew that scream, was it one of his Marines, was it one of  _his_ , who was –  _move_ , the sandbar, they're on the sandbar, and blood, thick like iron in the air, so much shiny slick blood, everywhere screams of agony and  _blood_ you need to  _move_ ,  _keep shooting, goddammit_ -

A twinge between his shoulders, the urge to roll them, to allow the familiar tingling to lead to cracking, spreading like fire down his spine, his arms, to let hair grow and teeth lengthen and to snap and snarl and  _fight_ -

"Hoosier, are you with me? Come  _on_ , we need to move, they need ammo down the line-"

A hand tugged on his arm, familiar and insistent, and his eyes snapped into focus on Runner's worried gaze, lit by an explosion in the water.

He steeled himself, flattening out his expression as he nodded. "Right. Let's go."

A battlefield was no fucking place for a wolf, he reminded himself. Invincible, he was not, and a bullet would do just as much damage to a wolf as it would a human, except there weren't any veterinarians around to fix him up if he got injured as the former.

When the Marines needed attack-wolves, he was sure they would let him know.

As quickly as the battle began, it was over, thousands of bullets evidently enough to temporarily subdue the emperor's army. They spent the rest of the night lying in wait, sure that more would break through the moment they took a breath, the moment they thought it safe to turn their heads away if only for a second.

It was only as dawn broke that the true carnage became evident. Seemingly hundreds of bodies lay strewn haphazardly across the riverbanks, strung up on the barbed wire, floating lazily in the current, swaying gently with the waves. In the humid climate and the steady heat of the climbing sun, the stench of decay was setting in quickly. The water was thick with blood, and yet so quickly washed it away, replacing it with the clear blue of the ocean, purifying it, making the river clean again of all of their gunpowder and sins.

Hoosier watched with morbid fascination as his old friend from last night approached, nothing but a swift line through the gentle current and a sense of foreboding indicating its presence, right before it surged out of the water and  _snapped_  down on one of the floating bodies, tugging it underwater in a flurry of new blood and surprised shouts from down the line.

 _Good for you_ , Hoosier found himself thinking almost amiably, but he couldn't quite explain why. Maybe because at least somebody was benefiting from all of this.

He was startled from his reveries by Runner nudging him, prompting him to heed the order to resupply down the line. The two quickly made their way to where Leckie and Chuckler were staring, dumbfounded and wondrous, at the veritable sea of bodies before them.

"Look at 'em all," Runner said, shaking his head in disbelief.

"I mean, we, we, we chewed 'em up!" Chuckler stuttered, eyes bright and eager.

"They just kept on comin'," Hoosier said.

The silence fell to Leckie, staring with unseeing eyes into the sandbags before him. "A real turkey shoot," he said, his tone flat.

Chuckler stared at him for only a moment before murmuring, "Lucky," and reaching out to pat him solidly on the shoulder, the helmet.

Part of Hoosier was almost proud of him, looking after his packmate like that, encouraging him to share in the victory of the hunt. The other part of him was thinking about how they were but so many  _humans_ , legion and expendable, and how easily that victory could have fallen to the crocodile, the hunter becoming the hunted. One wrong move, one stray bullet, and they could all be floating in that water, waiting for their prehistoric undertaker to spirit them away.

The biggest predator always wins in the end, after all.

A call went up that a live Japanese soldier had been found.

"Stick a pin in him, Doc!" he heard himself calling. That or toss him to the crocodile. Honestly, Hoosier's idea would probably be kinder.

The Jap shouted something, and then an explosion. Hoosier felt himself hitting the deck with his friends as chunks of gore sailed through the air.

Fuck it, the crocodile would have been too kind for him too.

More shouts came from across the river as a handful of Japs appeared, one by one, separated enough to be picked off just like Chuckler's turkey shoot predicted.

One man remained, running back and forth between potshots taken by jeering Marines, until he threw his hat down and shouted his despair to an indifferent sky. He entered the water, still shouting, uncaring to any threat that lurked beneath, staggering forward even as a shot hit his shoulder. Hoosier almost felt a begrudging respect for his desperation. He had seen the same before in rabbits that were hemmed in between two wolves. No matter how futile, they never gave up making one last attempt to succeed, to persevere. You had to respect your prey, for the effort they put into attempting to change their fate.

But prey always gets eaten in the end.

Hoosier glanced around, eyes cutting to the laughing men around him. The Jap in the water sobbed his loneliness, his desolation, and Hoosier was unwillingly brought back to a moment when he was very young, only four or five years old, when a lone wolf had wandered into their territory, killing livestock indiscriminately and getting the local farmers all hot to trot to hunt some wolves. As the pack alpha, Hoosier's mother was responsible for putting him down.

"Why's he doin' that, mama?" he'd asked, watching her fold her dress neatly and place it on a stool beside the door, preparing to exit into the night.

She'd smiled at him and cupped his cheek.

"Because he's all alone, baby. Wolf left alone too long, they can just about go crazy from it and lose all sense. Sometimes the nicest thing you can do is help him move on."

He'd looked up at her, considering.

"Is it still lonely, when you're dead?"

A hand ruffled through his hair, that smile ever-present.

"No, sweetheart. God makes sure that nobody's lonely in Heaven."

Japs didn't believe in God, and Hoosier doubted that they deserved a place in Heaven, but watching the man sob pathetically in the water, the last of his comrades and so, so alone, he couldn't help but hope that things were less lonely in death, if only to make him stop that awful crying.

Leckie stood without a word and shot the man, killing him instantly. He fell back into the water, fresh blood blooming up around him. Complaints arose in Leckie's direction, but he didn't respond.

Hoosier found himself watching Leckie as well, with that same considering look he'd worn all those years ago.

They had all made it out unscathed – he could see Phillips and Gibson and their mortar further down the bank – and they would all live to tell the tale, or at least for another day.

But they could so easily have been one of the casualties Corrigan reported, or one of those poor saps ordered to pick up the wounded Jap with the grenade. They could have been Stanley, alive but blinded for the rest of his days. They could have been one of those bastards in the water and strung out over the sandbar, surrounded by ever-growing clouds of black flies while their enemy picked at them like carrion birds searching for the choicest bits before the crocodile came in to take his due.

And fuck it, but Hoosier couldn't stand to imagine his friends like that. His skin crawled as if he was already one of those corpses, coated in flies and soon-to-be maggots. He didn't let himself get attached easily – shit, he'd never really been attached to anyone that wasn't a blood relative or a dog before. But he was attached to these miserable bastards, and his instincts weren't telling him to protect his friendly acquaintances from the Jap threat, they were telling him to protect his  _pack_.

If they were a little bit faster, a little bit stronger, a little bit more in tune with their senses and their instincts, a little bit more  _durable_ , they stood a better chance of making it through this tropical hellhole in relatively one piece. And if he could make them that way, protect them by formally  _making_  them pack...

Well, fuck it, that's what he would do.

Hoosier was going to save their miserable lives, whether they liked it or not.

~~~

There wasn't exactly an easy way to go about trying to turn someone into a werewolf without their prior knowledge, particularly when it was at least three someones and you were all in the Marines, surrounded by your comrades at all hours of the day and without even a moment of privacy to take a shit. Hoosier would be lucky if he could bite one of them without getting a gut full of lead, let alone three of them.

Or more.

He'd been deliberating for days on the subject of Phillips and Gibson. He was pretty much decided on Phillips – he'd rather that the kid survived, and he felt something like a pup already, so the transition, at least for Hoosier, wouldn't be so difficult.

But Gibson...

Well, Hoosier had pretty much made up his mind about him, too. The deliberation came in because he didn't know how he was going to explain it to the guys that he had changed them all, but that he didn't want to change their friend. He didn't wish Gibson any ill will, and he hoped that he'd make it through this nightmare alright, but he didn't want to be tethered to him for the rest of their lives, not when something about him still made him feel unsure, wary. Gibson felt like the calm before a storm, the way the earth smelled of ozone and the birds didn't sing, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Hoosier didn't want him tied to his pack when it dropped. He didn't want them to have to experience that pain.

And so it was decided, he'd take Phillips along with the other three. They would be a pack of five, a good number, small, but substantial enough to be taken seriously. And they would be quicker, safer,  _better_ , and maybe Hoosier could finally sleep more soundly at night knowing that they could properly watch his back just as he watched theirs.

Going about the actual change was the difficult part, because the Pacific Ocean wasn't exactly overrun with wolves. There were stray dogs on the island, and that would have to be enough of an excuse, but he'd still have to make his move at night to avoid bringing even more attention to himself. Better have them believe it was a mad dog than get them up in arms about a strange wolf on a tropical island.

All the same, there was still the matter of how Hoosier would get away to shift, travel back to his friends, bite them all, get away again to shift back, and then return to his foxhole, all without being shot or being recognized as conspicuously absent. The absence wouldn't be as hard – humans were inclined to believe what seemed the most "normal," the most familiar, and they wouldn't immediately associate a random animal attack with one of their own comrades, though it would be notable that only his group of friends got attacked.

The not getting shot part was more difficult, especially seeing as that corpsman had gotten killed for taking a piss around a trigger-happy watchman. Hoosier tried to console himself by remembering that he was fast, and he was good at keeping low to the ground, using the foliage and the shadows to his advantage.

The night he chose to act was dark as well, a new moon keeping all light from the sky except the twinkle of an endless field of stars, and that could only aid him in his endeavors.

After all, nobody expected a werewolf without a full moon.

It was the dead of night when he made his move. The entire island was quiet, even the constantly-calling birds seeming to have found somewhere else to roost. The sky was dark and empty without any missiles being volleyed between ships in the distance, no night flights given the lack of moonlight to guide their way. Even the Japs must have tucked themselves into bed for the evening, the lack of light that could be their ally also enough to hold them at bay.

And so it was that Hoosier was the only predator to come calling that night, waiting until only the men ordered to stand watch were left in the realm of the conscious before removing as much of his gear as he reasonably could and slinking out of his hole as quietly as possible, so as to not wake his friends.

He made sure that the guards saw him, knew he was getting up, said the password and made a joke about making sure they didn't shoot  _him_  for taking a piss. This encampment was only temporary for the night, and they didn't have a latrine ditch dug yet, which worked in Hoosier's favor, as the Marines on watch waved him on towards the trees, telling him to be quick about it and to watch his back.

Hoosier was almost impressed with himself for keeping his voice so casually cool as he walked off. He knew it was only the preternatural darkness of the night that kept his trembling hands from sight.

Once he had melted into the shadows of the trees, he wasted no time in shucking off his uniform. Removing some of his gear ahead of time helped with this, and it would certainly help when he was getting dressed again – part of the credibility of his story relied on a quick reappearance.

He actually surprised himself when he had to swallow a groan of pleasure as he finally let the shift overtake him, bones cracking and stretching, joints popping, muscle shifting and transforming smoothly into something compact and agile. The whole shift felt like stretching out a muscle that had been cramped for months now, his inability to shift making him grow slowly more and more tense, and the sudden release of that tension made him nearly limp with pleasure. If he'd had the opportunity, he would have spent some good long minutes just stretching, luxuriating in the pull of muscles in his back, the feeling of having four padded feet digging into the cool earth instead of two aching ones in a pair of stiff boots.

But he was on a tight schedule, and there was no time for such comforts. He could enjoy himself after the war – or when he was dead. Whichever came first, really.

Moving through the forest felt like it should have been more of a challenge. He was in a foreign land, surrounded by tropical vegetation he'd never experienced before, and yet he treaded easily through the brush as if it was the woods out behind his house in Indiana, the ground familiar and springy under his feet. All forests were forests, in the end, and this one was just as kind to him as any other.

The humidity was new, making the air hot and dense around him, pressing down heavily upon his thick fur. He could have done without the humidity. There were different scents too, sharper now with his new nose, the acrid scent of gunpowder and man becoming clearer with every step.

Hoosier was silent as he made his way back to the tree line, crouching in wait as he eyed the men on watch. They were good men, diligent, but even the best of guardsmen would look away at some point, if only to make sure that there wasn't any activity in another direction. That was when Hoosier made his move, creeping low across the ground as he slunk back to their foxhole. He could have silently navigated this as a human, but as a wolf, he was practically liquid as he crept his way to his sleeping comrades.

Nobody would ever see him coming.

They were all lumped together in the hole, the brush covering them keeping them mostly hidden from sight. And yet it was all too easy for Hoosier to climb down into the hole, and to take stock of his options.

In a curious way, it was as if fate had made things easy for him. With his eyesight much sharper in the gloom of the foxhole than it had ever been in his other form, he could make out Runner to his immediate right, clutching his rifle to his chest, a portent of just how wrong this could go if Hoosier didn't move quickly. It was more difficult to see further away from the entrance, but Hoosier could recognize Leckie and Chuckler sitting across from Runner, and Phillips and Gibson were somewhere near the back. He would have to be careful not to confuse them.

Limbs were his best bet, the least likely to accidentally puncture something vital, and if he was gentle they would heal relatively quickly, especially once the change took hold. They would scar, as change marks always did, but they wouldn't be too painful. They would forgive him, eventually.

There in the seeping darkness, Hoosier lunged forward and bit down.

His movements were fast, indiscriminate. He couldn't afford to be caught up in the sudden shouts of pain, the jerking away of legs and bodies, the sudden grappling for weapons, because this was the part where it could all go wrong so, so quickly. He was stronger and tougher than the average human, but he wasn't immortal. A gun would at best hurt like a bitch, and at worst, kill him dead where he stood. And even if he made it out with a gunshot wound, it wouldn't heal quickly enough for everyone not to notice if he returned as a human.

And so he moved with as much precision as was possible when trapped in a small foxhole full of suddenly-waking, terrified Marines, and bit one leg, two, three, feeling pleased with himself that he didn't accidentally bite the same person twice in his running. Phillips had been a close one, his legs tangled up in Gibson's as they scrambled awake, and Hoosier would admit that he'd probably only bit the right person from sheer luck alone.

He ended up scrabbling across someone's lap and accidentally caught Chuckler's arm instead of his leg. He couldn't mourn the mistake, because Chuckler's kneejerk reaction, without a gun or blade in his hand, was to punch him in the head, and wolf or not, that was near enough to drop Hoosier then and there. It was only his instincts screaming at him to save his miserable hide that had him scrabbling for the exit, and even then he was seeing stars. Someone jabbed at him with a bayonet, and it was only sheer luck and perhaps a burning pain in their calf that had them stumbling and missing him by inches.

When Hoosier reemerged from the foxhole, he was still blinking away the dizzying pain of Chuckler's hit and he stumbled, unsteady on his feet, just as a bullet whizzed by barely a foot over his head.

Their shouting had woken the others, and now everyone was preparing their weapons.

Fuck.

There was no stealth in Hoosier's run through camp this time, silent movements forgotten in favor of ones that were fast, ones that would save his life as bullets continued flying overhead, far, far too close for comfort. He dodged and weaved, jumping clear over the holes that he couldn't easily maneuver around, and made a break for the tree line.

"It's a fucking dog!" someone called out, and if he'd been able, Hoosier would have laughed out loud, if only because it was the first time it had ever occurred to him that the reason that everyone was shooting over his head was because they expected him to be human-sized and Jap-shaped.

"It fucking bit us!" a voice returned just as Hoosier breached the tree line, and he noted absently that it was Chuckler, and that he sounded fit to be tied.

Well, there was nothing for it. He would cross that bridge when he reached it. Hoosier instead occupied himself by executing perhaps the fastest shift of his life, almost painful as he pushed himself to change faster, trying to pull on his clothes before the fur had even finished receding, his long, canine nails catching on the worn fabric.

His haste worked somewhat in his favor, as he ran back towards the camp, his pants barely fastened and out of breath and looking properly stunned as he made his reappearance, shouting out the password as he approached and immediately following it up with, "What the fuck happened?"

"Where the fuck were you?" Chuckler replied hotly, clutching at his right bicep with the opposite hand. Blood was seeping slowly past his fingers, and Hoosier felt the sudden urge to wipe his mouth and make sure it wasn't stained there too.

He also felt the urge to avert his eyes, a sensation driven by something that almost tasted like guilt, but he steeled himself from it.

He'd had to do it; it would all be for the best in the end. A little bit of pain now to save them from a whole lot of heartache later.

They'd thank him, eventually, when they understood.

"Taking a piss, which apparently I can't do without the rest of you getting mauled."

They did look a sorry lot, Leckie, Runner, and Phillips – Sid, now, he guessed, seeing as they were about to be a whole lot closer – slumped around pressing their hands against their calves. Only Gibson was unscathed, as Hoosier had intended, and he swallowed thickly before he looked up at him and said, "I'm – I'm alright."

"Yeah, well I think you're the only one," Runner grumbled, his face pinched in what looked more like irritation than pain. He was probably worried about how the injury would affect those running skills for which he'd been named; Hoosier wasn't too worried, seeing as once it healed, he'd be even faster than before and have better endurance.

"I just don't understand," Sid was saying, "Why would it – why would a dog do that? Just come in here and attack us like that?"

"Probably rabies," Leckie muttered laconically, and Hoosier couldn't decide if he wanted to chuckle or be offended by that suggestion.

"It's possible," a corpsman said as he approached and immediately started examining Leckie's wound, ignoring all of the weapons still being waved about by nervous Marines. "We'll have to keep an eye out for that. So far no cases of rabies have been reported on any of the Pacific islands, but there's always room for a first."

Runner's wide-eyed look was comical. "What are you going to do if we  _do_  have rabies?"

The corpsman didn't even bother looking at him, focused on perfunctorily cleaning Leckie's wound and wrapping it in a bandage.

"Ideally, we would evacuate you to our nearest hospital, which is probably on Banika, where they would give you a course of rabies vaccinations which would hopefully kill the virus. But considering that we're currently stuck on this island with very limited supplies, certainly not rabies vaccines, and no available ships to get us out of here any time soon, I'm going to say that we'll just hope you don't have it."

The words were obviously not a comfort to anyone present, but there was little that Hoosier could do to assuage their fears without revealing himself to all and sundry and sounding like an utter lunatic. He wasn't too worried about it; after all, they would figure out after they failed to show any symptoms that they were going to be fine. They would survive a little bit of fear over not knowing.

Besides, he wasn't sure how they would take to the change. If they reacted poorly, it just might make them sick enough that people  _would_  think they had rabies.

But they would survive it, he was sure. It wasn't often that people didn't survive the change – or so he'd always been told – and Hoosier had the utmost confidence that anybody he decided to change into a werewolf would do just fine – at least physically.

There was a part of him, a part that he was actively ignoring and denying because it was no use to be an anxious mess in a literal war zone, that whispered in a sibilant, insidious voice that he had made a horrible mistake, one that he couldn't take back. Sure, his friends' bodies might accept the change, but their hearts, their minds? Nobody could control how another person would react to something, no matter how hard they tried (and oh, did he want to try).

There was no telling exactly what would happen next, and Hoosier, usually one who felt energized by the idea of adventure and the unknown, felt his skin prickle with a distinct, sharp sense of foreboding.

But what was done was done. He couldn't un-change someone, no matter how hard they wanted it. No matter how much he might come to regret his decision.

He had made his bed, and now they all had to lie in it.

The only thing to do was to tell himself that it didn't matter, that he'd made the right decision, that everything would be better in the end because of it.

He had to just sit back and wait for the chips to fall where they may.

The voice whispered on.

~~~

The one thing that Hoosier had failed to consider was that he had never actually witnessed someone change before. He understood, in theory, what was to happen: the person may experience the symptoms of a fever, as well as restlessness, hypersensitivity, aching joints, and on occasion mood swings, and then after a few days, they would essentially be overcome with the urge to shift. If they didn't know what was happening and were unprepared, the first shift was supposedly a terrifying and extremely painful experience. If they didn't fight it and allowed everything to happen naturally, it was a much smoother process.

Or at least, that's what the stories had said. Hoosier wasn't sure if it would still hurt. As a born wolf, shifting came as naturally to him as breathing; it was as if he had shrugged his shoulders and suddenly found himself in a new, four-legged body.

But for changed wolves...well, he didn't quite know what to expect. His mother had never changed anyone before.

"I'm not in that type of business," she'd always say, "A new wolf is like a newborn pup, only they need to be taught all of their instincts that a pup comes by naturally. Between you and this pack, I don't need any more responsibility."

Nobody in the pack ever changed anyone either. When Hoosier brought it up, his mother was more reticent to answer. His father had simply shrugged and said, "Everyone likes to follow the alpha's lead."

Nobody would tell him if his mother had actually made it a rule, and so he wasn't exactly sure how she would receive his new decision. Not that he planned on telling her any time soon. He was never much one for letter-writing, lacking Leckie's skill for prose or Chuckler's enthusiasm for contact or even Sid's simple quality of actually having a best friend to write to, but even if he did, he didn't think that it was the type of thing one told their mother via mail, least of all because the military's censors might have a question or two for him after reading that. No, he'd let her know when he made it home – if he made it home.

And wasn't that a new concern. It had been two days since he bit his new pack members, two days of pretending he was unconcerned while warily eyeing them all, waiting for the other shoe to finally drop and the fangs and the fur and the claws to appear, and in that time, he'd spent far too long reflecting on their status as a pack, and how the survival of each member would affect the others. They had not even fully changed, and yet, Hoosier still felt as if he was seeing his friends through new, clearer eyes, as if they and their continued survival were impossibly important.

He didn't know what to do with those feelings, the urge to make sure that everyone had eaten enough, the sudden compulsion to constantly check on their whereabouts, doing a headcount as they marched or staked out a new position or huddled up in a foxhole. He'd had to physically get up and leave when he'd found himself about to brush dirt and foliage out of Sid's hair after he'd taken a short tumble down a hill during a march, and God, his heart had leapt so far out of his chest he'd thought he was choking on it when that happened. Wasn't the whole point of this that he would feel more assured of their safety because he knew they were stronger, safer?

Yet here he was, eyes wide, breath caught on a fretful snarl that had knotted itself up in his chest as Sid cursed his misfortune and stumbled to his feet with Chuckler's help, grumbling good-naturedly as their buddies gave him shit for his lack of coordination. Even a normal human would have been fine after a tumble like that, Hoosier would have  _laughed_  at that, but it wasn't a normal human, it was one of  _his_  humans, who were no longer quite so human, and their continued safety and wellbeing had somehow moved so far up his list of priorities that he was almost fearful of what he might do in order to keep them safe.

The whisper told him that he would burn the world.

The rest of him told him to get a fucking grip, and that part sounded more like the person he had always known himself to be, independent, blithe,  _safe_ , and so he chose to listen to that part.

He turned away from the scene his friends made and marched on. Ignoring his problems was, after all, what he had always done best.

( _Ignoring them until you can't and shit hits the fan_ , the voice whispered, but Hoosier ignored that too.)

Hoosier wasn't one for rumination, and he despised catching himself in the act. A hostile tropical nightmare wasn't the place for existential anxiety (or perhaps it was all-too-fitting a place, but not for the reasons that Hoosier felt anxious), and he preferred to focus on the imminent instead of future problems and possibilities.

First things first: seeing his new packmates through the change.

That was much easier said than done. The guys were wary after being bitten, understandably so, seeing as they believed they had been randomly attacked by a potentially rabid dog and were worried for their health.

"If you really had rabies, you wouldn't know for a month or two anyways, so I don't see why you're all worryin' about it so much now," he'd told them. "You're still more likely to get blown up by a Jap anyways."

Somehow, they didn't seem to find that to be very reassuring.

The whole company was on edge, rumors abounding about wild dogs out for blood, or the even dumber alternative, dogs trained by the Japs to seek out unsuspecting Marines in the night.

"I hear they feed 'em the bodies of Marines that don't get buried quick enough," he heard Johnson whisper one night to an audience that was alternatingly awed and miserably bored. "Gets 'em a taste for American blood."

"I heard they'll even dig up the ones that are buried," added a voice that sounded like Turner.

"Fucking monsters," someone hissed, while someone else scoffed.

"Dogs don't like eating rotten meat," Hoosier said, not bothering to look away from his lookout post, eyes trained on the unmoving trees around them. "Their instincts tell 'em to avoid it. If they eat it they'll puke it back up, and they won't go back to it."

He didn't have to turn to have the strict sense that Johnson was rolling his eyes.

"That's what encourages 'em to want to hunt down  _live_  Marines instead!"

There was a chorus of hums and agreements, and a mutter of, "Shit, I once watched my hound dog eat a possum that'd been dead for a week and he scarfed that sucker down!"

Hoosier decided that this was one fight he wasn't going to bother pursuing.

After all, "blood-thirsty Jap dogs" was a safer alternative for him than "your fellow Marine's a werewolf."

Except that there were four Marines who really needed to learn the truth, sooner rather than later.

With everyone up in arms, it wasn't exactly as simple as pulling his friends aside and explaining what had transpired. But Hoosier had to find some way to tell them that they were going to turn into werewolves; he didn't know much about changing people, but he knew that letting them go into it blind was morally reprehensible enough to get his parents to disown him.

He told himself that that was the only reason, and that it had nothing to do with the shame he felt, the horror at the idea of letting them go through that lone, scared and alone, how easily they could get  _hurt_ -

Well.

It didn't bear thinking about.

In the end, it was both easier and more difficult than he'd expected. It was probably the best opportunity he'd get: his new pack were all in the same foxhole, lazing about in the sandy dirt as they gnawed on the same rations their fathers had eaten in the last war and hid away from the blinding sun. Gibson was helpfully absent when Runner gave Hoosier the perfect opening.

"Y'know, this weird thing happened to my uncle once," Runner said, prodding at the wound on his calf. After two days, the punctures had already closed and the skin around them looked healthy, the wounds themselves a flushed pink; Hoosier would bet anything that the change was already taking effect on that front.

"He was camping down in Letchworth – that's a state park near Buffalo – anyways, he was camping with some buddies of his, and in the middle of the night they all swear they hear something wandering around outside their tents, growling. Now in Letchworth, if you hear growling, you assume it's going to be a bear. They were all too afraid to move, so they hid out in their tents. The noises got louder, snarling, branches breaking, they're all sure they're about to get eaten by a bear.

"But then they hear it sniffing around, like it's looking for something and it gets closer and closer to their tents. It was a full moon that night, so they could see its shadow through the tents, and it's standing on two legs, like a human, sniffing at the air. It walks around a bit – still on two legs! – but they're all too scared to even breathe, let alone try to get a look at it. Eventually it wanders off, and when they come out the next morning, their stuff is all overturned, like it's been ransacked, but there's these tracks, and they're too small to be a bear's paws, the wrong shape too. But they  _look_  like they came from a really big dog...except that instead of having four feet, the tracks were only in pairs of two."

Runner paused and looked around the group meaningfully.

"Guys. What if we turn into werewolves or something?"

Chuckler snorted loudly, rubbing at the mark on his arm. "You think we're going to grow fur and howl at the moon and harass campers? You need to stop listening to so many spooky stories, I think they might be a little too scary for little Runner."

"Maybe we'll just kill all the local livestock until farmers come at us with pitchforks," Leckie chimed in. "Campers seem like such a hassle when the food is all right there for you."

"Do Japs use pitchforks?"

Leckie threw Runner a smirk. "They do when there are werewolves about."

"About that," Hoosier interjected, drawing everyone's attention to himself. They were smiling at him, waiting for him to get in on the joke, and knowing how they would feel in a few minutes made the words stick like thick paste in his throat. "You are turning into werewolves."

Leckie snorted; Chuckler barked a laugh and tossed a clod of dirt in Hoosier's direction. He missed, and it sailed cleanly over Hoosier's shoulder and landed somewhere near Sid, who cursed in surprise.

"I want to be a vampire," Runner said, his mouth full. He made a face as he had to chew with a particular effort to swallow down what was purported to be some sort of biscuit. "Turn into a bat and fly around."

"I think a tropical island is a really poor place to be a vampire," Sid hedged, glancing up at the dappled sun that still managed to break through the leafy canopy of their foxhole.

Chuckler rolled his eyes and attempted to rip a bite off of his biscuit. "Don't vampires turn into ghosts?"

"Mist," Leckie corrected, "They turn into mist. And bats."

This was, perhaps, not going quite as Hoosier had planned, but then again, he had not put much forethought into it in the first place. Sitting upright as if that would help them understand the severity of the situation, he said, "You didn't get bitten by a vampire, you got bitten by a wolf. You're turning into werewolves."

"Okay, if there are no  _vampires_  on an island, why would there be wolves?" Chuckler scoffed.

Hoosier eyed him for a long moment, staring until Chuckler finally met his gaze, and slowly shook his head.

"That look like a dog to you?" he asked in a low voice, never breaking eye contact. "You ever see a dog that large?"

That actually gained a pause from the others as they looked around their small circle, trying to ascertain each other's perspectives. The air in the foxhole was thick and sticky with humidity, and the sudden tension brought on by the weight of Hoosier's sincerity only served to bring it to the consistency of a dense stew.

"It was dark," Runner finally said, glancing down at his lap as he spoke. "And we were kind of busy being woken up when it took a bite out of us, so I don't think any of us got a good look at it."

"I got a good hit in, though." Chuckler smiled proudly; he hadn't shut up about it ever since it happened. Hoosier's head had stopped spinning after an hour or two, but the headache lasted through the night. He was lucky that any evidence of a bruise had healed before it got light enough out for the others to see it.

It had still hurt like a bitch, though.

Sid frowned and scratched absently at his leg, just above his own bite mark. "What would you know, anyway, Hoosier? You weren't even there."

There was a split-second where Hoosier felt a lie ready to trip its way off his tongue, quicksilver and so, so easy. But then his eyes tracked Sid scratching at his bite mark, the mark that  _he_  had left there, and he knew what was going to happen to them all. He couldn't leave them to go through that on their own, not just because it would be wrong.

He couldn't do that to his  _pack_.

In the end, the words sounded so casual and easy that nobody would ever know how they had lodged in his throat tight enough to choke him.

"I would say that I was, seeing as I was the wolf that bit you all."

He couldn't say that he was surprised when Chuckler laughed, or when Sid reared back in surprise, or when Leckie's eyes narrowed as he tried to assess the status of Hoosier's debatable sanity. He wasn't surprised, but he felt the beginning stirrings of uneasiness all the same.

Chuckler clapped him on the shoulder and squeezed, giving him a fond smile. "I think that's enough sun and Army rations for you, buddy."

His face fell the longer Hoosier stared at him, expression blank.

Waiting.

Leckie barked a rough laugh, as if it had been dragged out of him, and a less confident wolf might have flinched at the dismissal in that sound, a distant cousin to a threat. "You can't be serious."

Hoosier now turned his gaze on him, bland, penetrating, entirely unimpressed. Part of him wanted to move closer, wanted to stare beseechingly and beg them all just to  _understand_  that what he'd done was for the best. The other part just wanted this to be over with already, wanted to jump ahead to the part of the story where everyone understood and accepted what had happened and he had a pack and everyone was safe and happy and they weren't living in a fucking  _war zone_  and-

Well. That other part of him wanted a fantasy, and Hoosier had always prided himself on being a realist.

He continued to stare, unwavering.

Leckie swallowed visibly. "You're serious. Hoos..."

He trailed off, the professor for once without any of his quick, beautiful words to aid him.

Sid, usually one of the quieter ones, struck up the courage to broach, "Are you saying that you think you're... _actually_  a werewolf or something?"

Hoosier, for his part, was hard-pressed not to roll his eyes. He had expected this level of speculation and disbelief, and yet found it incredibly tiresome all the same.

(Finding it tiresome was so much easier than admitting that their disbelief, the weight of their critical gazes made him feel like his skin was crawling with so many ants and that he actually, for the first time in his life, gave a damn about what someone other than his parents thought of him. Irritation came so much more naturally than admitting that he cared.)

He knew there was little else he could do to convince them, and so he started tugging off his gear, hunched up in their low-ceilinged foxhole, ignoring the startled sounds of protests that this elicited.

"I'm gonna do this fast, so don't make a big deal about it or you'll get us all in trouble," he said, tugging his boots off with a harsh yank and then moving on to his pants. It wasn't easy, fully undressing while practically sitting down, but he'd done it enough times over the past few weeks that it was almost an art. "And whatever you do, don't scream. I hate screaming."

He didn't give them a chance to react – or for himself to have his own second thoughts about their reactions – before he let himself fall into the shift. The transition felt smooth, dropping to all fours and feeling the familiar tingling down his spine that precipitated the stretching and twisting of muscles, the quit  _pop_  and  _snap_  of bones and joints reforming and reshaping themselves for a new purpose. He'd always liked the part where his mottled grey fur grew out the best: it felt like a release, like everything that he'd kept bottled up inside about his true nature had been let loose and he could finally sigh and relax and be himself.

It probably looked grotesque, he imagined, to someone who had not spent his entire life going through those motions and watching his family do the same. The whole process only took a handful of seconds, but watching someone's body essentially come apart and put itself back together as something else probably looked like something out of one of those Hollywood monster movies. But then, some people passed out when watching a woman give birth, while a midwife wouldn't even blink an eye. Something is only unnatural,  _disgusting_ , if you aren't used to it.

His friends very much were not used to watching humans transform into wolves, and his only hope was that they didn't scream, that they wouldn't reject him without even giving him a chance to explain, to show that things were going to be okay, no,  _better_  than okay.

Indeed, they didn't exactly yell, but there were a few startled gasps that Hoosier would love to give them shit for, had he the current ability to do so. He settled for resting back on his haunches and giving Chuckler his best unimpressed look as his friend cursed a colorful blue streak under his breath. Leckie, for his part, looked as if his words had somehow failed him even worse than before, the whites of his rounded eyes showing, and Phillips was right there with him, mouth actually hanging open in shock.

And Runner? After the initial surprise and a small, startled jump, Runner was smiling like Christmas came early.

"I'll be damned," he mumbled almost breathlessly. He struggled from his seated position to his knees to get a closer look, his eyes intent, smile just this side of wondrous.

At least someone was properly enthused.

As much as Hoosier would have enjoyed sitting there and preening for a moment, he knew all too well that now was neither the time nor the place for a wolf. (He also knew that if he sat there any longer, his nerves might get the best of him, and fleeing wasn't something by which Hoosier liked to abide, no matter how many legs he had.)

Huffing loudly, he stood and shook himself out, stretching his legs and his back and exchanging his fur for human skin in the process.

He let out a soft sigh when it was done, letting his knees hit the ground as he braced his palms against the compacted dirt. He took one breath, two, his gaze fixed on the ground as if a weight kept him from lifting his head to take in the reactions of his silent friends. Panting for a moment, he grimaced, shook himself, and quickly set about dressing, giving his friends the chance to retrieve their jaws from the ground and himself a moment to regain his composure.

When he had finished and there still hadn't been a single word from any of them, he glanced up at them and raised an eyebrow, tone full of a bravado he had to struggle to feel. "Well?"

After another beat of silence, Sid finally said succinctly, "Holy shit."

The others were quick to echo that sentiment as it opened the floodgates, tripping over themselves to add on, "What the fuck, Hoos?" and "You mean you've been a werewolf this whole time and you never thought to tell us?" and "How can you do that without the full moon?" and perhaps most concerning, a growled, "What the  _fuck_."

"Will you keep it the fuck down?" Hoosier groused, glancing over at the entrance of the foxhole because it was easier than continuing to stare at their faces. "Are you trying to get me caught, 'cause that's what you're heading for."

Their words cut off abruptly, but his friends still stared at him with wide, wide eyes. Hoosier's mother never let him read  _Little Red Riding Hood_ as child (she claimed it was poor, offensive representation), but he knew enough for the words to creep into his head,  _"What big eyes you have."_

He should have taken the foreboding words as a warning, because it was then that Chuckler asked in a strangled voice, "You...you  _bit_  us? ... _Why?_ "

Hoosier was unused to having people that he would call close friends, and so he was even more unused to how the betrayal in that voice would dig at his heart, blunt nails clawing at his chest, sibilant whispers revolving his head repeating,  _Why, why? You knew this would happen. Why?_

It was a gift, he told himself, a protection. That was why. Because he couldn't stand to see them dying in this rotting, disease-infested hellhole, killed by an infection or the runs or a fucking  _mosquito_. He couldn't stop a bullet, and he couldn't stop a mortar shell, but he could protect them from some things, and what kind of friend would he be if he didn't look after them? What kind of friend doesn't do everything in his power to give his friends a fighting chance? What kind of friend stands by and watches the people he cares about  _die_  from something that could have been prevented?

He didn't say that. He wasn't Leckie, he didn't have the words, and he wasn't Chuckler, he didn't have the gregariousness, and he wasn't Runner, he didn't have the easy affection. He wasn't even Sid, with his polite smiles and desire to help.

He was just Hoosier, and he was selfish, and he wanted his friends to live because he cared about them. (Other words came to mind, words that felt too big and too meaningful and too heartbreaking for people staring at him with what was almost like fear in their eyes, and so Hoosier kept them hidden away even from himself.)

But of course he couldn't say that. And so he simply said, "Because it will give you a fighting chance. Make you more durable."

Durable, like they were the hull of a boat that was about to take a beating on the rocks, and shit, maybe they were.

But they were so much more than that, they were important, so,  _so_  important, and he could never tell them that, because that wasn't who he was. That wasn't what he did.

(It was, he considered distantly, rather ironic that it was easier to turn all of his friends into fucking  _werewolves_  than it was to admit to them that he cared about them and feared for their safety.)

"You're saying we're going to turn into  _that_?" Chuckler's eyes flicked up and down over Hoosier, his face twisted in distress and something that looked painfully like disgust.

He told himself he wasn't offended, but part of him felt a sharp pang of hurt, in that new, bright place in him that was learning what it was like to have friends, to have a pack, to have people he cared about who he hoped (prayed) cared for him too.

It felt something like rejection.

He wasn't a fan.

Hoosier ignored it, shoved it down with swift prejudice, and dug in his pocket for a smoke. If anybody noticed his hands shaking as he fumbled one out of the carton, they didn't comment.

"Yeah. Soon, probably next day or so."

He pulled out his lighter, already dinged up when their campaign had only just begun. The cigarette took a few moments to catch, a few blissful, distracting moments, and when he looked up, his friends were staring at him again, their faces like death.

"What the fuck," Chuckler was whispering, shaking his head slowly from side to side, "What the fuck."

Sid slumped back against the wall of the hole with a loud  _thump_ , his eyes blank, the dirt smearing along his uniform as he slid to the ground. Runner fairly collapsed nearby but maintaining a careful distance, as if needing the extra space to consider what was happening.

Only Leckie remained staring at Hoosier, his eyes shrewd, calculating. The professor was back again, and he was examining the problem from all angles.

A warm feeling bloomed in Hoosier's chest, and it felt something like gratefulness crossed with fond affection.

He kept his expression blank and took a long drag from his cigarette.

"Assuming this all works out the way you think it does," Leckie began slowly, "What happens if we get shot?"

Hoosier shrugged, blowing out a plume of smoke, the nicotine already performing miracles on his nerves. "Depends where you get shot. If it's fatal, it's fatal. Ain't nothing going to change that. You get shot in the head, you're a goner. If it's not..." He shrugged. "You'll probably heal a little quicker. Less chance of an infection unless you get really fucked up."

"And if we get malaria?"

He took another drag, slow, acting like his eyes weren't straying to the other three slumped in various states of shock, conspicuously silent when they always had so much to say.

"You won't. Or if you do, you'll survive. It won't be fun, but you're better off than any of these other poor saps. Probably won't get sores, either. Cuts and bruises heal faster. You'll be faster too, a little stronger. You aren't fucking Superman, but you're better than the average Marine."

Leckie continued to watch him, face unreadable, before he dropped down next to Hoosier and snatched the pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Tapping one out, he held it out expectantly until Hoosier sighed and lit it with his own. They sat together like that, close enough for their shoulders to brush, smoking and watching the other three who were still lost in their own worlds, and Hoosier didn't even want to think about the sudden rush of relief that flooded him when Leckie's arm pressed up against his, close as ever.

"What about this actual wolf shit?" Leckie asked. He glanced sideways at Hoosier, watching him from the corner of his eye while keeping himself facing their other friends, looking out for them.

 _Such a good packmate,_  the voice whispered.

"We're going to do...what you did?"

"Part of being a werewolf is, actually, turning into a wolf." Sarcasm had always been Hoosier's friend, even when he didn't have a single other one to his name.

"But there isn't a full moon for weeks."

Hoosier leveled him an unimpressed stare, and it almost felt like everything was normal.

"Did I need a full moon before? No. Wolves like full moons because they can see better, and humans think they only shift at the full moon because that's when it's easiest to see a pack of wolves running around. The moon doesn't mean any more to us than it does to anyone else. We shift 'cause it feels unnatural not to, but we don't have to do it because the fucking moon or the stars told us to."

"So we can stop it?" Chuckler's head had jerked up and he was staring at them intently, his expression fervent and hopeful. "We can stay normal?"

Well, fuck.

He had to shut that down quick.

"No. The younger or newer you are, the more you're going to feel like you have to shift. New wolves feel it after the first few days, once the change sets in. Can't help themselves."

"Well why the fuck not?"

Chuckler was stumbling to his feet now, looming over their seated forms as much as one could in the short confines of their foxhole. His jaw was clenched tightly, his fists curled, and nobody needed Hoosier's enhanced senses to know how upset he was.

The memory of his fist slamming into the side of Hoosier's head was still fresh in his mind.

Hoosier took another drag and released it slowly, the smoke curling between them, a useless barrier but one he felt he needed all the same.

"Because you're a wolf now. You can deny it all you want, but when you can't hold off the shift anymore, that'll just make it even more painful when it happens. You accept it, it might not hurt at all."

He didn't tell them that he had no fucking clue how it would work with bitten wolves. Best not to agitate them even more.

"There has to be a way," Chuckler insisted, "Some sort of, some sort of cure. There's got to be a way to undo it!"

"Calm down," Hoosier grunted, casting a look towards the opening of the foxhole, where the rest of the company milled about, oblivious, and really,  _how_  had nobody come looking for them yet? "No, there's not a cure, because it's not a fucking disease. You may not feel it yet, but you're a wolf now. You're gonna have to shift, and you're gonna feel like shit if you try to avoid the pack."

" _Pack_?" Runner yelped. He and Sid had apparently rejoined the conversation, the latter peering owlishly over Runner's shoulder as they crowded in around them.

Hoosier shrugged, trying not to squirm under the weight of so many stares and feeling brittle and on-edge at being so thoroughly boxed in, they were hovering over him like they were superior to him and they  _weren't_ , they needed to  _listen_ , they were  _his pack_ -

"Wolves have packs," Hoosier said, expression flat, gaze flickering across their faces. Challenging.

" _I_  don't," Chuckler said, his voice lowering ominously. "I have  _friends_ , and I fucking thought you were one of them until you turned us into, into fucking  _monsters_!"

That cast a pall over the foxhole, stunned expressions befalling everyone except for Hoosier.

He sighed, the only expression he would let himself show. He knew there'd have to be at least one. He just hadn't predicted it being Chuckler. Leckie had seemed so much more likely.

"I mean, it might not even work," Sid hedged carefully, his voice loud in the sudden quiet. "We might just stay human."

"Nope," Hoosier cut in, "I can already smell it on you, you're wolves."

It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell himself that he didn't care that they were all essentially looking for ways to reject him, that they didn't want to be his pack.

Runner grimaced, glancing between Hoosier and Chuckler. "You could have asked us."

"Would you have said yes?"

The look he got in return was even more uncomfortable. "I don't know, but you should have asked. We should have had a choice."

" _Thank you!_ " Chuckler said loudly, waving a hand at Runner, near enough to almost hit him. "You can't just decide our lives for us!"

Hoosier got to his feet now, trying to match Chuckler's height. It wasn't difficult to do, given how the low roof of the foxhole made crouching and slumping a necessity.

"I can if it's going to keep you safe."

After what had happened when he bit Chuckler, he should have expected what came next, but the fist to his face still took Hoosier by surprise. He fell back against the wall, almost falling on his ass before Chuckler grabbed him by the shirt only to hold him up so he could hit him again.

Hoosier tasted blood.

The guys were shouting, Runner and Leckie prying Chuckler away and trying to placate him. Chuckler wouldn't hear their words, his eyes blazing bright with his anger and indignation.

"You don't get to decide that! You don't get to fuck up our lives like that just because you want to!"

He lunged forward again, but this time the others were able to restrain him.

"Hoosier, just get the fuck out of here," Leckie grunted, not bothering to spare him a glance.

It rankled Hoosier, the suggestion that he'd run off like a cowardly pup with his tail between his legs, that he would just abandon his _pack_  like that instead of hashing things out, but the more pragmatic part of him admitted that there was a difference between fleeing and a tactical retreat.

Right now, Chuckler wasn't going to listen to him, and there wasn't really any use in arguing, especially when it was only going to draw more unwanted attention to them – even now, he could hear boots approaching at a clip, coming to see what all the ruckus was about.

Without a word, he turned and climbed out of the foxhole and into the light, ignoring the part of him that was snarling to get back in there and grab them all by the scruffs of their necks and make things  _right_.

They would have to come around soon. In the waves of fury wafting off of Chuckler had also been the scent of change and newness, of a wolf coming into their own.

Their first shift was going to happen tonight.

~~~

He avoided the pack for the rest of the day, ignoring the questioning looks from the rest of the company and tending to his injuries in private. The cut on the inside of his cheek had already closed, though the area was still sore. He would have had a black eye as well, had he been human, but instead he got away with a large bruise across his cheekbone that still drew more than a few stares as it took longer than usual to heal. Apparently Chuckler's werewolf strength had come in a bit early. His only real luck was that Corrigan seemed disinclined to ask what had happened, or perhaps he really didn't give a damn. At this point, nothing would surprise Hoosier.

He made his way back to them in the evening as the sun was setting and the jungle became preternaturally dark, having found it abnormally hard to stay away so long in the first place. H Company was continuing to hold their current position for the night, Marines all around him settling in with their weapons whether or not they were on watch. They would likely move out come dawn. Given his new packmates' scents and the agitation that only egged the change along, he doubted that they would make it that long.

They were going to shift tonight.

But fuck, was it a bad time for that. Getting himself into the woods and back without being shot had been something akin to a miracle and had taken more than his share of luck. A bunch of brand new wolves, shifting for the first time, surrounded by trigger-happy Marines who had already shown that they would shoot their own men if startled at night? The disorientation alone would have them stumbling around the makeshift camp, whether it be with two legs or four. There was no way they could all leave and return without being noticed or gaining a few new unfortunate ventilation holes.

Like any tropical storm, when fleeing wasn't an option, one was better off hunkering down and sheltering in place.

They would have to shift in the foxhole, and stay there.

With that many wolves, they should probably stop calling it a foxhole.

Not for the first time, Hoosier found himself reweighing his choices. Changing new wolves was difficult enough when the conditions to do so were perfect, when everyone was informed and agreed to the change ahead of time and embraced what was to come, but in the middle of a warzone in a strange place, trying to keep your own comrades from shooting you should they find out what you were? It was perhaps not the best timing, to be sure.

But there wasn't another option, he reminded himself grimly, not if he wanted to leave them exposed to all manner of bullshit that was out to kill them. Fuck, the jungle alone could do the job, without any human intervention. They  _needed_  this. And regardless, he couldn't change the past, so why bother worrying about it? His pack were about to shift; he was going to see them through it.

He slid into their dark, shadowed foxhole without a sound, ignoring the flinches and jerking movements of his pack as they reacted to his sudden presence. Looking at them all, he was surprised that they even reacted that much, but also became more resolved in his mission.

They were a mess, obviously in no shape for a secret rendezvous in the woods – at least if they wanted to make it there in one piece and keep it a secret. Even a human nose could detect that they were all sweating something fierce, more than was even the norm on Guadalcanal, where the humidity would kill you if the sun didn't.

With the sun almost gone and the foxhole covered, it was only through Hoosier's enhanced eyesight that he could see much of anything.

Sid had his shirt off and was breathing heavily, great shuddering inhales as he curled up with his head pressed to his knees. The rest weren't much better off: Leckie was ghostly white even in the dark and shaking, a drop of sweat rolling down his nose; Chuckler had his hands pressed to his ears and his head tucked in close to his chest, senses probably already feeling hypersensitive; and Runner was doing their closest approximation to standing guard, crouched with a rifle held loosely in his shaking grasp, probably unable to hit anything that didn't fling itself upon his bayonet.

"Gibson came by a little while ago," Runner mumbled numbly, glancing up through his eyelashes at Hoosier but otherwise remaining unmoving. "He wanted to know what happened. When he saw us, he thought we all had malaria. Or rabies. Corpsman told everyone to avoid us for the night, just in case. Check on us in the morning."

Well, that was rather serendipitous.

"Better than we could've hoped for," Hoosier said, "Seeing as y'all are gonna shift tonight."

The sound that Chuckler let out was a snarl that no human could have ever hoped to make, but Hoosier decided for once in his life to be merciful and refrained from commenting on it. Best not to get him even more agitated, especially when they were trying to keep this quiet.

"Look," he said in a low voice, with a glance at the part of the foxhole that wasn't covered with brush, "It's gonna happen, whether you want it to or not. And if you fight it, it's gonna hurt. If it hurts, you're gonna scream, and if you scream, we're all gonna get found out and then we'll get shot, and we won't have much of a chance of coming back from that. So if you  _don't_  wanna get shot, you're gonna let it fucking happen."

" _You did this to us_ ," Chuckler hissed through gritted teeth. He had his eyes clenched tightly shut, even in the darkness of the foxhole, trying to block out much more than the barely-existent light.

There wasn't much Hoosier could say to that, nothing he could do to change what had happened or make them all suddenly come around to his point of view. Swallowing against the arguments and half-apologies that were filling up his throat, he settled on a quiet, "It'll feel better once you shift."

" _Fuck you_."

Hoosier took a deep breath, steeling himself, and shrugged. "Yeah, fuck me, whatever. You boys have got to strip, unless you want to explain why your uniforms are all in shreds in the morning."

" _Fuck you_ ," he heard in chorus this time, but at least Leckie and Runner moved to comply. Sid looked like he started to, and then he let out a truly miserable whimper and slumped over on his side, still curled tightly in a ball. Even in the dark Hoosier could see the muscles in his back clenching, growing tighter, the skin rippling along his spine.

"Fuck, looks like Phillips is getting started early."

He crouched over Sid and made quick work of his boots and trousers, tugging them from Sid's stiff, uncooperative limbs. Sid barely reacted, only moaning when Hoosier forced him to uncurl.

"Shh, shh." Hoosier glanced nervously towards the entrance of the foxhole. The last thing they needed was to draw the corpsman's attention again thinking that one of them was dying. "Come on, you're alright. Straighten out a little or it's gonna feel worse."

Hoosier could feel the others watching over his shoulder as he forced Sid out of his ball again. He didn't know what compelled him to run a firm hand along the trail of Sid's sweat-covered spine while murmuring placating shit his mama would have said. Maybe it was because she was his only frame of reference for something even remotely similar to this. Maybe it was because something inside him told him that this was what he was supposed to be doing.

Regardless, it was like the steady, repetitive movement flipped a switch, because Sid went nearly boneless, sighing in relief like someone had put a cool cloth over his feverish brow. Hoosier nearly took his hand away in surprise, but then Sid's breath hitched quietly, as if he was about to sneeze, and his shoulders rippled, the movement echoing down his spine, and in only a few breathless seconds, those muscles and bones had rearranged themselves into something sturdy and panting and furred.

Hoosier couldn't see what color Sid was, probably some mixture of greys and browns like his own fur, but he could see that he was most definitely a wolf. An exhausted one at that, given the way his tail thumped exactly once before lying flat in the dirt while Sid panted tiredly.

"You're alright," Hoosier heard himself saying, his hand continuing to run the length of Sid's back, fingers buried in thick fur that still had a bit of pup fluff to it. "You did it, you're alright."

He couldn't make out Sid's reaction, if he had one at all, but he didn't try to bite Hoosier, so he probably didn't mind it.

When he looked back at the others, he  _could_  see their faces in the gloom, enough to know that they were experiencing the same awe-struck shock as this afternoon. There wasn't time for that anymore.

"Now do you all believe me? Fucking  _relax_  and it won't feel so bad."

Leckie and Runner, at least, had finished stripping, but Chuckler had not made any move to do so. He was still staring at Sid, his eyes disbelieving.

Hoosier snorted. "Pet him or something, he'll probably like it. And take your goddamn boots off, they'll be harder to replace than anything else."

Chuckler didn't deign to look at him, and he didn't bother to take his boots off, but he did kneel down next to Sid and place a shaking, tentative hand on his neck.

Sid made a soft grumbling sound that had Chuckler pulling his hand back in surprise; noticing the hand's absence, Sid whined softly and nosed around blindly, prodding his muzzle firmly against Chuckler's thigh in his search for more attention.

With a small smile he probably thought nobody would notice, Chuckler's hand return to Sid's fur, stroking gently from the top of his head to his shoulder. Sid sighed happily and thumped his tail a few more times before falling into a light sleep.

Huh. Maybe new wolves slept like pups too, so exhausted from the shift itself that they couldn't bother to do anything else with it. That would be good for the pack tonight, given that there regrettably wasn't anywhere that Hoosier could take them running.

He nearly missed Leckie and Runner shifting, one right after the other, because the only sound either of them made was a sharp yelp from Leckie when something snapped into place around his shoulders. They didn't shift as smoothly as Sid, the change jerky and more abrupt, moving in fits and starts, probably because they both appeared much more cognizant than he was and couldn't help putting up some level of resistance. Regardless, they both remained admirably quiet, though Runner let out a low groan of pain that escalated into a chuffing growl.

When all was said and done, Hoosier could make out only that Runner was smaller than Leckie, and his fur was a darker shade. He also immediately rolled into Leckie, slumping against his side and burying his muzzle in the thick fur at Leckie's neck. Leckie, for his part, only groaned and laid his head on his paws, leaning back into Runner as he closed his eyes.

No matter their opinions, at least those two were willing to make it easy.

Chuckler still had a hand on Sid, but he was watching the other two warily. When he noticed Hoosier's eyes on him, he glared.

"I'm not doing it."

Hoosier didn't bother resisting rolling his eyes. "It's happening. Just get over it and fucking accept it already."

"I will not-!" Chuckler swallowed and glanced around furtively before lowering his voice. "I will not  _just accept it_  because you want me to. I don't have to accept a fucking thing that you did to me, because you didn't bother to ask any of us what we wanted. And I do  _not_  want this."

"Well right now, it doesn't matter what you want, it matters that this is happening, and you need it to happen, 'cause shit's only gonna feel worse if you keep holding it back."

It didn't take an expert to see the tension in Chuckler's body, the tight, pained way that he held himself. It had never been that bad for Hoosier, but then, he couldn't even remember his own first shift, and he'd never tried to resist it before. The closest experience he could relate it to was when he hadn't shifted in a while. He'd heard what happened to wolves that went for a long period of time without shifting, those that were so set on living their lives as humans that something broke inside them and it all came out one day in a torrent of fur and claws and fangs and blood.

There was a reason that humans feared the legend of the werewolf, after all.

Things weren't going to get to that stage in his pack; he wouldn't allow it. He wasn't their alpha – he wasn't cut out to be anybody's leader, despite whatever ideas his mother had about succession – but he had turned them, and it was his responsibility to see them through this.

Even if he had to nudge them along and make them comply.

In that moment, he knew he was stronger than Chuckler. The others had been weak as newborn kittens, and Chuckler appeared to have been straining even worse than they were to hold back the shift. If he wanted to, Hoosier could probably hold his friend down, get him out of the rest of his uniform so that he didn't ruin it, and  _make_  him shift.

But Chuckler was still staring at him with that accusatory expression, those hunted, betrayed eyes, and there was no way that he could follow through with it.

He thought back to his own childhood, to when his own shifts were uncontrolled. Sometimes he would literally sneeze and turn out a wolf, and others he would feel the shift moving restlessly under his skin and yet be unable to initiate it, no matter how jittery and restless he got. When he couldn't make himself shift, his parents had a pretty set pattern of behavior down: his father would shift first, curling up around him and licking all along his neck and ears, while his mother knelt next to him and ran a comforting hand down his back.

When he'd asked her once what she was doing, she'd said, "We lead by example, baby," and she'd shifted then, joining his father to surround him in a pile of warm, familiar fur, and it was as if the feeling of them, the smell, the wet snuffling around his ears and in his hair, was enough to trigger that part of him that had gotten stuck, and in moments his parents would have a small pup flopped over them, huffing in exhaustion, and his father would pick him up by his scruff to settle him firmly between his feet for a proper grooming, dragging him back with an insistent paw whenever he tried to escape, and-

Well, he couldn't pull most of that off with a pack of grown-ass adult wolves, but he could do part of it.

Turning away from Chuckler for the moment, he quickly removed his own gear, tucking it away against the wall, before turning back and meeting Chuckler's eyes. He shifted, feeling his bones rearranging themselves, his senses broadening, his tail growing, and the entire time, he never removed his gaze from Chuckler's, even as his vision sharpened and broadened. Chuckler was visibly unnerved, one hand still clenched in Sid's fur.

Never losing his gaze, Hoosier took one step forward, and then two, until he was face to face with Chuckler. The air between them was fraught with tension, hovering on the edge of some unknown precipice. Moving slowly, he ducked forward and sniffed carefully down Chuckler's face before licking up the side of his neck to his ear once, twice.

Chuckler didn't even move away, not at first. He blinked in confusion, hissing, "What the fuck, man?" Hoosier ignored him and turn away, curling around Phillips with a huff and resting his head on the other's stomach, all while staring up at Chuckler.

Chuckler looked between Hoosier and Sid, and Leckie and Runner, and let out a noise that was definitely a whine. He barely had time to look horrified with himself before he whimpered,  _"Fuck_ ," and scrambled to kick off his boots. That was all he had a chance to do before he fell to his hands and knees, groaning as his spine made a loud, painful-sounding cracking noise.

He was still fighting it.

Hoosier shot to his feet, stepping towards Chuckler and licking again at his neck, the nape this time. He nosed at the knot between his shoulder blades before moving back to his neck and nipping with just the lightest glance of teeth.

Chuckler jolted as if he'd been properly bitten and it was as if he tripped into the shift in the process, whimpering in surprise as his limbs jolted and creaked their way into new positions, hair receding and growing all in one smooth motion, until there was suddenly a wolf struggling to work his way out of a pair of pants.

It wasn't like Hoosier hadn't warned him. At least they didn't appear to be ripped.

Chuckler kicked his way free, stumbling forward and nearly collapsing as he did. Hoosier was tempted to step after him, to nudge and nose him down next to Phillips, keeping them together where he could be sure they were safe, but Chuckler pointedly made his way on stiff and awkward legs towards Runner and Leckie, next to whom he collapsed without a modicum of grace.

The others were almost entirely unconscious and barely twitched at the move, but Hoosier was fully awake and aware as Chuckler opened one eye and stared directly at him. They looked at each other for one long moment, a timeless few seconds perforated only by the sounds of canine grumbles, before Chuckler closed his eyes and turned his head away.

It was a dismissal, to be sure, but not necessarily one that Hoosier felt he didn't deserve. At least, he told himself, everyone would be quiet for the night. They'd made it through the shifts unnoticed.

He lay down once more next to Sid, and the other wolf pressed back against him once more, even in his sleep.

Hoosier rested his head on his paws, his eyes still on the other three wolves.

Now they just had to make it through the night without being caught.

And the rest of the war, of course. But who was counting?  
  
~~~

Hoosier was barely able to sleep that night, too high-strung and alert to any potential for danger outside of their dark, fur-filled fox(wolf?)hole. Sid was a warm weight at his side, heavy and entirely unconscious to the world. His new scent was reminiscent of the sweet, soft tones of a pup who hadn't quite yet grown into his adult legs, uncoordinated and gangly and in need of protection, and something in Hoosier's chest twisted and squirmed like a pinned insect with his desire to be the one doing that protecting.

He viciously suppressed it, not wanting to admit to himself that he knew exactly what those protective stirrings were, what made him lay up all night with his ears pricked forward, straining to hear anything out of place in the soft huffs and quiet grumbles of his packmates.

Some dumb, ridiculously idiotic part of his hindbrain thought that he was supposed to be their alpha. That stupid, feral, ancient predator pacing around the back of his mind had decided that since he had created these wolves, and he was the only one among them with any experience as a wolf, he was therefore responsible for them and they should acknowledge and respond accordingly to his authority.

His mother would be so proud of him, if she didn't laugh herself to tears first. It had been her lifelong goal, after all, to raise him to succeed her as the alpha of their family pack, to have him take over responsibility for her vast territory and all of those wolves who lived within it, to guide them and protect them and see to their wellbeing. It had been his grandmother's role before his mother's, and his great-grandfather's before that, and as his mother's only child, Hoosier had known from an early age that it was his mother's deepest wish for him to take on that role as well.

It had then, of course, been his deepest wish to flee in the opposite fucking direction, because Hoosier wanted to lead others in the same way that the Japs wanted to cheerfully and sincerely celebrate the Fourth of July, which was to say, not in his wildest nightmares. He had no interest in giving orders or being responsible for making decisions that influenced others' lives. He had never wanted to be relied upon in an emergency and was the absolute worst person to go to looking for guidance. Hell, he didn't even really like his mother's pack that much to begin with, certainly not enough to want to take responsibility for their care.

He just wanted to live his life the way he wanted, free to remain in the background with his dogs, away from the spotlight and from all of those sycophants who would try to use him as a means to get in close with his mother, to sway her decisions in their favor.

His father understood this, to a degree. Sometimes Hoosier thought that his father was even sympathetic to his wishes, letting him run off to play with dogs on full moons instead of forcing him to spend time with children who only played with him on their parents' orders and giving him permission to stay in his room during pack meetings instead of forcing him to make appearances with the rest of the pack.

But his father also greatly respected his mother as alpha, and in the end would always cave to her wishes after having said his piece. And his mother wanted Hoosier to continue the family legacy as pack alpha.

She would be overjoyed if he became the alpha of his own pack, seeing it only as a stepping stone to him finally giving in to something his family had deemed his destiny before he had even been born.

Yet just as it had been back home in Indiana, the idea of taking leadership of others was anathema to him, perhaps even more so because these were people who he could finally call his  _friends_. The relationship between an alpha and their pack was inherently lopsided. Even if their relationship was normally a partnership, when push came to shove, Hoosier's father always relented to his mother on major issues, because she was the alpha and she was in charge.

His stomach twisted in disgust at having that kind of power over the first people he had ever truly seen as friends. A friendship shouldn't be that way, shouldn't involve power dynamics and hierarchies and superiority. Hoosier wasn't well-versed in having two-legged friends but even he knew that much. They should be equal, everyone's ideas holding the same merit, decisions made by group consensus. They should look after each other equally, care for and protect each other equally. It was a central tenet of the military that you could rely on your brothers to look out for you, after all.

But then again, he'd already violated some of those ideals, hadn't he? There had been nothing equal about his decision to bite his friends, and that had been very much  _his_  decision, without any input or consent or even prior knowledge from his friends. A voice in his head that sounded eerily like his mother reminded him that taking control of a situation for the greater good of all involved was very much something that an alpha would do.

And fuck, but Hoosier didn't want to be their alpha.

Somewhat hysterically, he thought that he hadn't even taken control of situations when they were all human. He was perfectly pleased to let Chuckler take charge of their little group, with Leckie acting as key adviser and Runner egging them on and Sid and occasionally Gibson tagging along for the ride. But he'd changed all of that, now, because wolves always looked for an alpha. They always sought out that pack structure, looking to it for some sort of innate familiarity. As much as Hoosier chafed against it, he knew what happened to wolves without packs, without leadership. He wasn't going to let that happen to his pack, but he didn't exactly plan on taking over, either.

He would be their equal, he would be their packmate, he would teach them how to be wolves, but he would not be their alpha. Chuckler was welcome to that position if he wanted, welcome to take control and make decisions and interact with others on their behalf, and really, he was much better at it anyway. People liked Chuckler, liked his easy smiles, his charisma. He could be quite the diplomat, with a little more polish. On the other hand, even the most positive assessments of Hoosier described him as prickly and morose, occasionally obtuse. Those weren't the qualities of anyone who should be leading a pack, especially not in a combat zone.

No, Hoosier would look out for his pack, but he wasn't going to be their alpha. That was in everyone's best interests, least of all his own.

But he still spent that night with barely a wink of sleep, tense, ready,  _waiting_  for any threat to this fragile new pack he'd created, from the enemy or even from their own men. He wasn't going to be their alpha, but he was going to do his damndest to see them safely through this war, no matter how much they hated him for it.

They could thank him when it was over.

~~~

He must have dozed off eventually somewhere near dawn. He couldn't remember falling asleep, cursed himself for doing so upon waking, but sometime while he'd been out, his packmates had shifted back into their human forms in their sleep. It was actually the movement of Sid's body as it shifted next to him that jolted him into awareness. It was good, though, that it happened that way, because it gave Hoosier time to shift and pull his clothes on and then wake them all to make sure they were dressed before anyone came around looking for them with morning orders.

It was clear as they blinked at him groggily, more disoriented and unaware than they'd ever been upon waking since they'd boarded a ship to the Pacific, that they weren't entirely sure what had gone on last night. And so Hoosier had to watch with no small amount of nauseous trepidation as they blinked the sleep from their eyes, took in their dirt-streaked, naked forms that Hoosier had hastily covered with their forgotten clothes, and looked up at him with wide, confused gazes, just until the details of their situation finished percolating in their brains and then their expressions twisted in muted horror and they reared back, away from him, away from what he had done.

Runner's rejection was unexpectedly the one that hurt the most. Hoosier was used to Chuckler and Leckie's occasional moodiness, the latter most of all, but Runner? Barely anything ever truly upset him, and if it did, he had never before aimed that ire in Hoosier's direction. But that look of shock, of horror, even if just for a moment before he composed himself...he would never be able to forget that.

He shuffled backwards just as they had, giving them more space. Unable to meet their eyes and telling himself it was to give them privacy to dress, he muttered, "I'm gonna go find us something to eat," and quickly ducked out of the foxhole and into the muggy, mosquito-filled light.

Nobody said anything or made any move to stop him.

He told himself that it was a good thing.

The camp was just waking up, Marines climbing out of their foxholes and foraging for their meals just as Hoosier was, but the jungle had been awake for quite some time now. The air was alive with the sounds of thousands of insects humming in the trees, waiting to be caught and eaten by the birds swooping and hollering through the leaves overhead. Nature on Guadalcanal, just as in America, did not prescribe to the schedules of men.

Their rations for the morning were yet another Army reject, but at this point, absolutely nobody was surprised. The Marines, it seemed, prided themselves on being superior to the Army in all areas except for food, in which case they were all too pleased to ply their men with Army castoffs and endless K-rations.

It was with these that Hoosier returned to the foxhole. The looks he received – that was, from those who would even look at him – were wary at best. He dropped the bagful of rations in the middle of their small circle.

"Got breakfast," he mumbled, feeling the unusual urge to avert his gaze.

 _You're ashamed_ , the voice said,  _You should be able to provide better for your pack_.

He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Nobody made any move towards the bag. Leckie stared at him, his face unreadable. Chuckler's was far too easy to read, his incredulous scowl clear to anyone with eyes and half a brain. Runner and Sid wouldn't even look at him.

He ducked his head, rubbing the back of his neck and desperately quashing whatever pathetic sound of supplication had tried to crawl its way up his throat.

"Well? You gonna eat or not?"

The look Chuckler shot him was sharp enough to cut even without knowing that he had fangs and claws.

"Or what? You'll force us to do that too?"

Runner would look at  _him_ , at least. "Chuck..."

"What? You're gonna defend him?" Chuckler's gaze was vicious, accusatory, and Runner had never liked to go against Chuckler's desires anyway, even before Hoosier had introduced pack dynamics to it. Chuckler already had the bearing of an alpha, and the following of one too, seeing how Runner shrunk back, probably not even realizing how his head tilted just the slightest bit to the left, vulnerable, placating.

"No, no, of course not, we're all pissed too. It's just-"

"But you don't want me to  _say_  it? Are we all just supposed to act like nothing happened until we  _get over_  it?"

 _Yes_ , Hoosier thought rather helplessly,  _Yes, that was the plan, you get over it, and everything will be the same, and I'll be_ -

And he'd be what? Alpha?

No, Chuckler was far more suited to that, and from the way the others grouped around him, even unconsciously, they surely agreed. He'd be lucky to be a part of their pack at this rate, and it would only be because they didn't know how to stay away.

"There's no use getting in a fight now, not when we're all stuck together anyway," Leckie said. He wasn't at all cowed by Chuckler's glare, staring back with an unimpressed face.

"You're just going to roll over and take this?"

Leckie's grin was quick, and far too sharp.

"What, like a dog?"

Chuckler visibly flinched, his face flushing with more than just anger, but Runner actually let out a startled laugh.

"Fuck. I guess we better stop calling it a foxhole, huh."

He reached for the bag and pulled out one of the rations, making a face at it. "I don't like this vintage. It's a bit dry for my tastes."

He handed it off to Sid before digging out another, offering it to Chuckler.

Chuckler looked at it as if Runner had just tried to give him one of the hundreds of crabs that seemed to dog Hoosier's every move on this godforsaken island.

"Are you seriously going to ignore that he turned us all into fucking freaks?"

Runner ducked his head again, his mouth pulling downwards, and it was so much easier to focus on him than for Hoosier to admit that he was feeling much the same.

"Look," he said quietly, "Even if we're mad, we still have to eat, and we still have to be ready to move soon, and we still have to be near him. We'll save the fighting for-"

"For when?" Chuckler lowered his voice to a hiss. "For when we stop being  _goddamned werewolves_  thanks to him? For when we stop being  _monsters_  because of him? Because he  _did this to us_  and didn't even ask us first? Tell me, when's that going to happen, because that's what I'm waiting for."

"You aren't  _monsters_ ," Hoosier heard himself responding, the words riding on low-simmering feelings of anger and offense and miserable, wretched rejection. "There's nothing  _wrong_  with you-"

"There's everything wrong with us, we turn into fucking  _dogs_  now!"

"Will you keep it down?" Leckie hissed, glancing around to make sure they hadn't drawn any attention, "Do you  _want_  us to get caught, just after you assured us that everyone would see us as monstrous freaks? Like it or not, we're  _all_  those monstrous freaks now. Do I like it? No, I do not, but I don't want to die even more, and something tells me that shouting about it to the entire company is a good way to get shot."

He glared at Chuckler, unwavering even as both Sid and Runner averted their own stares in the face of Chuckler's ire.

 _He would make a good beta_ , Hoosier thought. But a beta to whom, that was the real question.

He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

But he did know that he wasn't going to be any help here. Not when everyone was so on edge, alternatingly avoiding his gaze or ready to have a go at wringing his throat.

"I'll go see when we're moving out," he mumbled, grabbing up what gear he had left in the foxhole.

Chuckler's anger, instead of abating, amazingly grew further.

"You're just gonna run away from this now? From this mess you made of us?"

"Chuck, just shut up and eat," Leckie grumbled with a sigh.

Hoosier forced his legs to move, forced himself to walk away and not look back lest he start another argument or make things worse, but he couldn't avoid hearing Sid's voice piping up, "Do you even want him here?"

He jogged away, putting as much distance between him and them as possible, hoping that the din of the camp would keep him from having to hear the answer.

~~~

He'd forgotten to grab one of the rations before making his illustrious exit, but it felt like maybe that was for the best. Focusing on the gnawing hunger in his stomach was much more preferable to noticing just how much his pack – his friends, if he could still call them that – were trying to ignore him.

This felt worse than the last few days of his friends avoiding him – or him avoiding them – maybe because he knew a little of what it was like to have them as a pack now, to have other wolves nearby who he actually  _liked_.

Or maybe it was just because they'd seen what he was, what they were now, and they'd called themselves monsters, freaks, and it was clear that even if they said it of themselves, they were really directing it at Hoosier. He was, after all, the original monster, the head freak.

If they didn't have the ability to reject this new part of themselves, they could still reject him.

It was becoming more obvious that a rift had formed between them, as they trekked through the woods and Hoosier remained a considerable distance behind his friends. He had already gotten a few strange looks, the errant, "You okay?" from one or two overly kind souls, but Hoosier found that ignoring everyone worked fairly well to express how much he didn't want to talk about it.

His friends certainly didn't, given how they walked with their heads ducked together, whispering furtively in the moments where the COs didn't demand total silence. Gibson was with them, and Hoosier felt something painfully like jealousy curling low in his gut when he saw that. Gibson, the man he'd decided against turning, Gibson, the man who wasn't a wolf,  _he_  was who his pack wanted to spend time with,  _Gibson_  was acceptable, but Hoosier? They hadn't sent a single look back his way, and didn't seem at all bothered by it.

_Would they even notice if you weren't there?_

They would notice, of course, eventually, if only because pack was always drawn back to pack in the end. There were four of them, and they had each other, and so they would feel alright for a while, but they were new to this, new to being wolves, and eventually they wouldn't be able to avoid seeking him out, if only because he was the wolf who had turned them and they would instinctively look to him for guidance.

(He couldn't say they would go to him for comfort, because given how skittish they were towards him, he wasn't sure they would ever be comfortable around him again.)

Hoosier kept his distance, and they kept theirs, and if one of them had to suffer for it, well, at least he was the only one to know.

His stomach grumbled angrily, hunger tight in his core, and Hoosier marched on.

He couldn't keep himself away that night, feet instinctively moving to seek out his packmates in the dark of the woods where they'd hunkered down for the evening on the damp, leaf-riddled ground. He hadn't even consciously recognized his destination until Leckie stepped in front of him, head ducked, eyes wary.

He glanced over his shoulder back at the others, and then squared them against Hoosier.

"It might be best if you go somewhere else," he said.

He didn't say anything else. He didn't have to.

Hoosier didn't say anything either, as he turned and left. Words raced through his head, smart remarks, apathetic quips, anything to tell them that he didn't really care that much, that he was fine on his own, that he'd done this all for them and they should be goddamn  _grateful_  for it-

-that they would want him back eventually, when the pull got too strong, surely they would have to want him back-

-but he said nothing, and he walked away.

The jungle was warm that night, thick with humidity and dozens of the thudding, fearful hearts of Marines, and yet Hoosier felt colder than he'd ever been.

He didn't sleep a wink, but it didn't really feel like it mattered. He would keep watch over his pack, even if they didn't want him to.

~~~

It had been days without seeing a single Jap, and everyone was on edge. They could hear them, fighting battles in the air, at sea. They found their old positions, their dead, their supplies. But they didn't find the actual soldiers, and everyone was starting to get nervous.

Hoosier in particular was on edge, because it had officially been two days since he'd spoken to what he was still calling his pack, and so far not one of them had seemed bothered. In fact, they went on as if everything was completely normal, as if they didn't even notice that Hoosier was gone.

The other Marines had noticed, of course. Corrigan kept shooting Hoosier weird looks, but if ignoring him didn't work, staring back with dead eyes usually did the trick. He didn't really like Hoosier, and the feeling was fairly mutual, so he didn't really care enough to ask Hoosier what was going on, for which he was grateful.

It was hard enough watching his own rejection without trying to find a way to articulate it to someone else.

(It was even harder to try to describe it all without having to admit that he had, in his attempts to protect his friends, put himself in this exact position and was the only one to blame for his problems.)

Telling himself that he really didn't care, that he didn't mind being alone, that it would all be for the best in the end anyway, was a cold comfort when he was spending his third night away from the pack, huddled up with his knees to his chest and his rifle at his shoulder, ears straining to pick out the sounds of his pack amongst the sighs and grumbles of the rest of the company. He wasn't assigned to watch, but once again he could barely sleep for more than thirty minutes before jolting awake and frantically searching out the sounds of his pack, making sure that they were present and breathing and most of all  _safe_. He couldn't look after them, but he could do this much.

He told himself it was to make sure that they didn't somehow accidentally shift in their sleep – after all, he had no clue what to expect about how well newly turned wolves could control urges to shift, especially when unconscious – and maybe it was a little bit for that. But the longer he spent away from the pack, the more he needed this one small way of feeling like he was still connected to them.

Well. It wasn't exactly  _small_ , seeing as he felt like absolute shit all the time, but he would feel like shit even if he  _was_  sleeping at night given how acutely he was being rejected by his very, very new pack, so it didn't really matter in the end. Looking like death warmed over and feeling worse was worth it if he could argue with himself that it was helping his friends.

Hoosier would later tell himself that the lack of sleep was the sole reason why he actually jumped in surprise when he suddenly found Sid at his side on their march the next morning.

"You don't look so good," Sid mumbled, voice nearly carried away in the sound of boots crunching and gear rustling. They were moving to take over a relatively safe position from another company, and absolute silence wasn't imperative.

"I'm fine," Hoosier grunted, staring resolutely ahead and telling himself that the words felt thick in his throat because of the humidity and nothing else. He inhaled deeply, breathing in Sid's increasingly familiar scent of dirt and gunpowder and trees and  _pack_. He would die before he admitted it, but there was always something about Sid that smelled a little bit like sunshine on a hot summer day, bright and warm and new. Maybe it was because he was the youngest in the pack, or maybe that's just what Mobile smelled like. Whatever it was, it still made something ache in Hoosier's chest, something he didn't want to touch with a ten foot pole.

"You don't look fine. You look...tired."

"No shit, we're wandering around the jungle playing a game of chicken with guys who don't mind killing themselves if it means killing us too and I look like I haven't been gettin' my beauty sleep?"

He could sense more than see Sid's chagrinned grimace, but he wouldn't let himself feel remorseful for it. He missed the pack, sure, but he wasn't just going to roll over and beg them to like him again, not when this was all to help them.

He nearly tripped over his own boots when Sid's shoulder pressed up against his, just for a moment, so briefly there and then gone with the next step.

"You know that's not what I mean," Sid murmured.

He did it again, brushing his arm against Hoosier's and walking far closer than necessary, and Hoosier felt inclined to glance around them to make sure that nobody saw what was going on, even if he knew that it looked entirely innocuous. Fuck, it  _was_  innocuous, to anyone who didn't know how being frozen out by your pack could make a wolf touch-starved. It was barely a touch, and through two layers of dirty, sweaty fabric at that, but Hoosier suddenly felt more solid, more  _whole_  than he had in days.

"Yeah, well, shit happens," he said nonsensically, unwilling to admit that he was at turns thrilled and extremely uncomfortable and frustrated with himself for feeling so thrown by such a simple touch.

"We kind of feel like shit too," Sid continued. He looked sideways at Hoosier, just briefly through his lashes, before turning back to continue staring at the back of the man in front of him. "The guys don't want to admit it, but it feels like something's wrong without you there, even when you're not that far away at all."

Hoosier weighed his options. On one hand, he could explain exactly what was happening and risk everyone getting pissy with him all over again; on the other, he could be careful with his explanations, but then risk everything coming out later to even more anger.

Lying – even by omission – had already gotten him sleepless nights full of regret. He didn't need any more.

"It's a wolf thing," he mumbled, resolutely refusing to look at Sid as he spoke. "Something to keep us close with our pack. We aren't meant to be alone, so if we're away from our pack for too long, we start to get anxious and feel like shit. You guys are new, so you're probably gonna feel it worse than usual. I'm the one that turned you, so right now you notice me bein' gone more"

He could feel Sid's eyes on him, hear his sharp intake of breath as he stared at Hoosier. "If we feel this bad when we're barely apart, how are we gonna feel when we go home?"

Hoosier shrugged and refrained from saying anything, because he didn't think Sid would appreciate him admitting that he had no goddamned clue because he hadn't bothered to think that far ahead.

He let the words hang there in the air, heavy, accusatory, until Sid finally realized that no real answer would be forthcoming. He sighed loudly and then was silent for a few steps, nothing but the sound of boots on the ground and the quiet mumblings of the Marines around them.

And then, an arm nudged against Hoosier's own.

"You should stay with us tonight," Sid said quietly. "Everyone's still upset, but if it'll make us feel a bit better to be together – if it'll make  _all_  of us feel better – then it's stupid not to do it. We can be upset and still make the best of a bad situation."

It was either exceptionally pragmatic or incredibly naive, and Hoosier had to refrain from making any myriad of remarks about how he strongly doubted that Chuckler would agree with those sentiments. But he was self-centered enough to know that he had no interest in playing the martyr, not when he was being offered a chance to get closer to his pack again.

"Yeah. Alright."

Sid didn't respond, but his arm brushed Hoosier's again as if he was actually pleased, as if at least some part of him didn't resent Hoosier's presence, and right now, he would take what he could get.

They marched on in silence.

~~~

It was clear when Hoosier approached his friends that night that they were of mixed minds about having him near again. Runner looked like he almost wanted to smile, but then he cut a quick glance at Chuckler and his mouth firmed into a grim line. Chuckler, for his part, was naturally glaring death, and at this point Hoosier could almost tell himself that he was used to it. He expected it, for sure.

And Leckie, Leckie just continued to watch him, face impassive, unreadable.

Everything was tense, stiff like new boots that hadn't been broken in yet, and yet it felt like such an unbelievable relief to be near his friends again that Hoosier couldn't even get his not-so-proverbial ruff up. They could hate him all they wanted, if he could just be near them while they did it.

(He may not have been a martyr, but he was starting to suspect that he was something of a masochist. That, or he was just plain pathetic. Shameless, to be sure.)

He didn't let it bother him as he settled into the shallow trench that the previous company had left for them. He sat a few feet further away from everyone than he normally would, but it seemed like the sort of thing they would appreciate; maybe with some more distance between them, Chuckler would look less apt to try to strangle him.

"Sid explained everything," Leckie said, breaking Hoosier from his thoughts. "About needing to stick together."

"It's an instinct thing," Hoosier said, not knowing why he was trying to explain further when it hadn't been asked of him; the reason felt something like guilt. "Lone wolves don't last long, and if they do, they don't come back the same. If you stick with a pack, you're more likely to survive. Wolves that feel the need to stick together survive longer."

"Is that why you bit us?" Runner asked abruptly. "So we'd have to stick together?"

That prodded at a whole cornucopia of feelings and instincts that Hoosier had absolutely no desire to acknowledge, let alone critically examine, and so he settled for a blank stare.

"I bit you so you'd survive better. Sticking together helps you survive."

Chuckler scoffed, and Hoosier was hard pressed not to show his exhaustion in that moment, because exactly no part of him wanted to get into it with Chuckler now, not when he'd finally been accepted even tentatively back into the fold.

" _Or_  it just forces us to have to deal with your sorry ass, even if we want nothing to do with you."

The other three sent Chuckler expressions filled with varying levels of censure and reproach, but Hoosier couldn't even bother to be grateful to them, not when Chuckler was staring at him like that, his eyes pained and oh so sincere.

He said nothing, because he wasn't sure there was anything he could say. Nothing productive, at least.

Chuckler looked like he was going to push the matter – Lord knew he'd been waiting for a real fight for days – but Runner stopped him with a hand on his arm and a shake of his head. Stunningly, he actually complied, choosing instead to turn his back on Hoosier.

Admittedly it stung, a quick, sharp stab of rejection deep in his gut, but at this point it was better than anything else Hoosier could have expected from him.

With a barely audible sigh, he settled back against the side of the ditch and closed his eyes.

Maybe it was because he was exhausted and hadn't really slept in days, or maybe it was because his pack was near and he could finally calm down, but Hoosier must have fallen asleep in moments, because it wasn't much later when he suddenly felt someone press up against his side, their body aligning with his from shoulder to knee. He would have jolted away if not for the haze blanketing his senses, telling him that he was home, that he was safe, that the smell was the familiar one of his pack and he had nothing to fear.

He cracked open one eye to find not Sid, as he might have expected, but Leckie, his head titled back against the wall and his eyes shut. This close, it was easy to feel his pulse and hear his breathing, enough so to know that he was still awake, though resolutely pretending otherwise so that he didn't have to discuss his actions with Hoosier.

Well, whatever. It wasn't like he minded much anyway.

The humidity may have been stifling, but the warm weight of his friend against his side was more comforting than any cool breeze could have ever been.

~~~

Thunder rumbled ominously overhead as Hoosier made his way through the overbearing darkness back to where his pack had hunkered down for the night. Once upon a time that thunder might have been intimidating, but after weeks of Jap artillery followed by enough rainstorms to convince a pious man that he might need to build a boat, it was barely even a notable part of his trek. The darkness wasn't much of a problem for Hoosier either: given his superior eyesight, even without the light of the moon to see by, he had better vision than any of his fellow Marines and had little problem picking his way back to their small homemade bunker.

No, the thunder and the darkness weren't much of a problem, but the rain, slipping and sliding around in the mud as he weaved his way around other hastily made foxholes with his bag of loot? The rain, he could do without. Even the dumbest of wolves knew to look for shelter when the rain came.

He ducked into their foxhole, little more than a wide hole in the ground with their rain ponchos and some foliage stretched out over the top as a makeshift roof. It wasn't waterproof, not with the way the water pooled on top only to drip over the edges in a steady stream that made staying completely dry a distant dream, but it was better than sitting out in the elements.

"Supper's on, supper's on."

Chuckler and Leckie both looked over at him as he entered.

"Get anything good?" Chuckler asked. It was probably the most peaceable thing he'd had to say to Hoosier in over a week.

"What are those?" Runner followed immediately afterwards.

Hoosier dug into the bag and started handing out his findings.

"Army rations," he said, moving to take a seat between Runner and Sid, who was curled up and trying to sleep. "From 1918. Quartermaster over in Dog Company claims they're edible...after you suck on 'em for about an hour or two."

His date estimate wasn't far off, though the claims of edibility were dubious at best, given how everyone was gnawing fruitlessly on the edges of what was intended to be some sort of biscuit. They hadn't had anything approaching normal civilian food in weeks; he would kill for a meal even approaching the slop they'd fed them on the ship.

Chuckler held up his ration, crunching loudly. "Is this all you could find?"

Hoosier dug in the bag for his own brick and gave him a flat look. "You fuckin' forage next time."

This was the level that their interactions had reached: it wasn't as bad as Chuckler lunging for his throat at every available opportunity, but he spent most of his time criticizing every single thing that Hoosier did – or didn't do – or should have done – and it got old pretty fast. Especially when Hoosier was the one who went out of his way, in the thrice-damned never-ending rain, to another  _company_  in order to find food for his pack, only to be met with more ungrateful, snide remarks.

He wanted to say something. That voice in the back of his head was urging him to put Chuckler in his place, to let him know with no uncertainties exactly who was in charge here.  _He_  was the one who provided them with food,  _he_  was the one who looked after them all,  _he_  was the-

And that was exactly why Hoosier restricted himself to sarcasm and apathy, because a part of him strongly, sincerely desired to assert his position as their alpha and get all of his pack members to fall in line, and that was something that Hoosier's rational,  _smart_  conscious mind absolutely did not want. Anyone else was welcome to look for food, anyone else was welcome to take care of the pack. Hoosier would gladly let Chuckler take control if he wanted it. But if he wasn't going to, then for now, Hoosier would have to act the part, and they would all just have to live with it.

Leckie pointedly sat down his biscuit and picked up his pen to continue whatever it was he was scribbling about now, drawing all of their attention. Runner could never resist hearing about Leckie's writing, always wanting to know who it was for, what it was about, and prodded him into talking about it. Hoosier sat back and let their bickering about Leckie's "letter" to Vera wash over him in a way that was much more soothing than the droplets of cold water currently running down the back of his collar. Teasing was good, teasing meant everything was okay.

"I'm gonna tell her the truth," Leckie said casually, "We've been swallowed by the jungle and five thousand Japs are waiting to kill us."

If anyone knew how to somehow ruin a moment that was already pretty terrible, it was Robert Leckie.

Everyone visibly slumped, whatever levity there had been now completely gone. Hoosier barely resisted rolling his eyes as said, "Hey, thanks for brightening the mood."

"Oh, I do what I can," Leckie said, meeting his eyes. They watched each other wordlessly for a long moment before Leckie turned back to his writing.

Holding back the gusty sigh that he could feel building in his lungs, Hoosier instead pulled the last remaining brick that claimed to be rations from the bag and used it to prod at Sid's sleeping form.

"Hey, Phillips. Eat."

Sid grumbled wordlessly into his arm, leading Hoosier to only poke at him more.

"C'mon, get it while it's hot."

Sid just barely raised his head to give him an incredulous look.

"You got hot chow?"

Hoosier snorted. "Fuck, no. I got you this brick."

He threw it charitably at Sid's face, ignoring his curses as he leaned over to mess up Sid's hair before trying to break off a piece of his own ration.

When he glanced up again, Chuckler was watching him; when he noticed Hoosier's gaze, he resolutely looked away.

Hoosier shook his head and went back to the rock that he was choosing to call his supper.

At least they weren't trying to punch each other in the face anymore.

~~~

Apparently his friends weren't quite so bad at foraging, if only because they were also shameful opportunists. Hoosier was always one for mischief, but he was also unabashedly lazy when provided the occasion, and so he left Leckie, Chuckler, and Sid to their own devices when they went off to raid the unattended Army supplies on the beach when the Japs started bombing the air field. Hoosier was perfectly willing to let them have their fun while he stayed behind with Runner, who had been mounted on a log over what was serving as a latrine ditch for the better part of an hour.

"I thought you said we wouldn't get sick anymore!" he'd hissed at Hoosier yesterday, when in the exact same position in which he now found himself.

"Now, now," Hoosier had drawled, "I said you were less likely to get sick. Even canines get the shits."

Runner had shockingly not found this nearly as entertaining as Hoosier did.

All the same, Hoosier thought he was being awful kind by keeping Runner company when everyone else ran off to loot the beach.

Runner didn't really agree, but it was the thought that counted. Besides, someone had to watch their machine guns.

When they returned, Sid had ushered a shivering Gibson off to another hole, wrapping a blanket around him and helping him settle in. Hoosier had a few different conflicted feelings about that, most of which involved some level of growling and dragging errant pups back where they belonged by their scruffs, and so he instead turned his attention into what plunder the others had brought with them. Leckie was all too pleased to show off his finds: a pair of stolen moccasins, a box of cigars that Leckie intended to keep all for himself, and some cans of peaches that he was so kindly willing to share with the class.

Even Hoosier had to admit he was impressed, groaning, "oh my God," as he eagerly caught his own can and set about opening it. It was no hot meal, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd had fruit.

"Peaches!" Runner groused, "I got the goddamn runs and you had to get peaches!"

"They were all out of cheese, Runner!" Leckie gleefully called back.

Hoosier ignored them both, all too eager to drink down the peach juice in big, shameless gulps. It was sweet and thick and it tasted like summers in his mother's kitchen, her hand playfully swatting him away from the peaches she was slicing for a pie and yet always letting him make off with at least one in the end.

Leckie puking up said peaches had not featured in his childhood memories, but he imagined that his mother would at least appreciate Chuckler's concerns about wasting food as he ran forward not to help his sputtering packmate, but to scoop up the open can of peaches he had so carelessly dropped.

"Wolves don't waste food," his mother had always said. Chuckler would do her proud, if they ever met.

(The ifs and whens and eventualities of their lives after the war were one of Hoosier's favorite topics to ignore with extreme prejudice, and so he refused to think upon it further.)

"Peaches, your new name is Peaches!" Runner laughed from his log.

"Fuck you!"

"You got it, Peaches!"

Both Runner and Leckie devolved into messy, sputtering laughter, the former adding, "You gotta write Vera about this!"

Hoosier sipped at his own peaches with somewhat more restraint now, watching the two and shaking his head.

He tried not to wonder about just what his mother would think of them.

(But he liked to imagine that she would like them very much. She would like his choice in packmates.)

~~~

Runner was still sitting guard over that log come nightfall, trading quips with Leckie, when all hell broke loose upon them for the second time in their relatively short careers. Except this time, there was no enemy to shoot at, no clear target to vanquish.

This time all they could do was run and hide.

The Jap artillery came suddenly and out of nowhere, shattering the quiet of the night and a few dozen trees along with it. It strafed in a line towards their position, a steady stream of bright flashes and concussive explosions sending wood and shrapnel everywhere.

Hoosier was already in their foxhole when the attack started, the closest thing to a den that he had, but it did little to assuage his instincts. A wolf did not like to back down from a threat to its pack, not unless it had no other option. Baring his teeth at artillery was going to do little to ward it off, and so seeking shelter was the next best option, but it still smarted to be hunkered down like prey, waiting to be picked off by a bigger, stronger predator and hoping against hope that they just so happened to miss.

Leckie and Runner threw themselves down in the foxhole, and Hoosier had only a small moment in between blasts to be thankful that all of his pack was accounted for if not yet safe when over someone's wordless cries came a yelping bark.

A black and tan mutt came skittering down into the foxhole, her ears tucked back and her tail between her legs, and Hoosier didn't even think, moving purely on instinct to grab her up and scoop her into his arms, holding her in his lap and curling his body around hers to protect her as best he could.

He hadn't smelled any dogs around this area, hadn't seen or heard her creeping through the trees looking for any scraps that the men might be willing to toss her way, but she must have been scared out of her hiding place by the explosions. All the same, he was relieved to see her, not only because he could keep her safe, but because he hadn't seen a dog in months. People were an every day struggle, but dogs? Dogs were the easiest thing in the world. People wanted explanations, arguments, reasons, you had to fight to earn and keep their positive regard. All you had to do was care for a dog in order for it to love you.

The dog whined, high-pitched and scared, and Hoosier rocked her and glanced up at the shoddy ceiling of their foxhole.

"You're okay, we're gonna make it through," he told her, "You're okay, you're okay."

Another explosion went off right near them, loud enough to shake his soul, let alone the earth. Hoosier grabbed at his helmet with one hand and ducked his head, his other hand holding the dog tightly to him.

" _Shit!_ " someone shouted as branches fell across their hole.

The sky was lit with flashes of white and red, the heat of it all searing against his skin. His ears were ringing but he could still hear Dog's whimpers.

"I ain't goin' anywhere," he told her, clutching her to him as he hunched over her.

"Fuck you!" Chuckler was shouting towards the cacophonous sky, right before timbers across the top of the foxhole started to collapse in on them.

The whole world was convulsing, tearing itself apart at the seams and reforming around them in clouds of dirt and wood and gunpowder, and all he could do was cling to Dog and tell her again and again, "You're okay, you're okay."

Maybe if Dog was okay, the rest of them might be okay, too.

The bombing seemed endless, as if the sky itself was revolting against their presence and the earth conspired to drag them back down from whence they came, but somehow, against all odds, the sun still rose the next morning.

Hoosier blinked with incredulous eyes at the light filtering through the branches covering their foxhole. With numbed ears he could hear birds singing merrily in the distance, immune to the hacking coughs of miserable Marines attempting to crawl out of their would-be graves. Overhead the sounds of rescue attempts were already underway, injured men being evacuated while others dug frantically to free their friends.

One by one, Hoosier's pack made their slow exodus back to the surface world. After the others had left the foxhole, he finally loosened his iron grip on Dog, allowing her to exit before crawling out after her and taking stock of what was left of their company.

The area was decimated, burned up vehicles interspersing still-smoldering trees and intermittent fires. Men were running left and right, attempting to bring out the wounded, to locate the dead.

Hoosier sat at the entrance of the foxhole, Dog lying dutifully at his feet, and looked over at Leckie as he panted. The look Leckie gave him was grim, but for a moment, it almost neared a smile: against all odds, they had survived, if only for another few hours.

Hoosier couldn't do anything more than breathe.

~~~

They spent the day cleaning up from the night before, tending to the wounded and rebuilding their fortifications as best they could. Corrigan joined them in their foxhole around midday as they were cleaning their weapons. The Japs were moving, and Hoosier and Runner were to set up a listening post on the tree line to keep watch for them while the others prepped the machine gun placements. Their line was spread so thin, their best hope of survival was that the Japs would circumvent their position entirely in order to hit the airfield.

In Hoosier's experience, relying on the Japs to do any one thing was usually a good way to bet that the exact opposite would occur, and it would never be in your favor.

Corrigan must have recognized this, because in an uncharacteristic fit of charity, he tossed them a pack of Lucky Strikes.

"That was the gesture of a gentleman," Runner said, snatching up the pack of smokes.

"We must really be fucked," Hoosier replied.

Runner smirked and tapped out a cigarette.

"Yep."

~~~

They weren't, in fact, fucked. The Japs skipped over them entirely, just as Corrigan had hoped, and they just spent the next few days holed up in their position on constant alert for an attack that never came, watching planes fly back and forth overhead, dropping bombs on miserable bastards who were, for once, not them.

The 7th Marine Regiment a bit to the east across the river – Chesty Puller's men – well, they were fucked but good, but they held their position in the end. The Japs didn't reach the airfield, and Hoosier's pack didn't have to confront them.

It was a stroke of luck that made Hoosier think that they almost,  _almost_ , had a chance of making it out of this shithole alive.

~~~

A few weeks later found them experiencing something akin to actual peace. A real camp had been set up, complete with all of the fittings of home – that was to say, care packages from the States intended to wish them all a very merry Christmas on Guadalcanal. They had real food, real smokes, nobody was shooting at them – shit, all they needed were real girls and they could start calling their lifestyle downright decadent.

Hoosier sat wrapped in a blanket even as the sun beat mercilessly down upon them. Dog lay atop a crate next to him upon her own blanket, licking at his hand as he cooed quiet nonsense to her. Leckie was scribbling in his book, his face scrunched up in the way that meant he was thinking deep, miserable thoughts. Hoosier would have remarked upon it, but he had been reliably informed that deep, miserable thoughts were the only way that writers made a living, and so he let it go in favor of playing with Dog, who was fast becoming his favorite pack member.

He was distracted from her when Chuckler handed him a full canteen before settling in beside him.

They had made a relatively uneasy truce, after the battle. Chuckler was still angry with him, but the anger was easier to deal with when not faced with any overt signs that they were actually wolves now. They thankfully hadn't felt the urge to shift since that first night, though Hoosier was sure it was going to crop up again soon. Without it, however, it seemed that his packmates were all too willing to wave off whatever enhanced senses they had and act like everything was continuing as it had before the change, as if they were still regular humans.

On one hand, Hoosier didn't mind it at all, because it meant that Chuckler had started treating him as something approaching a friend again instead of the bane of his existence, and the others stopped acting so skittish around him. On the other, it didn't do them any good to deny their true nature, especially when rejecting their instincts only made them come back even worse than before.

But for now, he was too busy enjoying this tentative peace to destroy it with reality. And so he took the water and drank in big, grateful gulps as Runner once more prodded Leckie into talking about his writing, this time an "ode to our glorious victory at Guadalcanal."

"Must be hard to write that poem," Sid mused. "I mean, what the hell rhymes with 'Guadalcanal'?"

"How fucked are we now on Guadalcanal?" Hoosier helpfully supplied, wrapping his blanket more tightly around himself. Christ, it was hot, and yet he felt like the living dead and that blanket was the only thing keeping him together.

Corrigan interrupted their poetry meeting with an unusual spring in his step.

"Get your gear and stand by to stand by," he said, "We're finally leaving this shithole."

The group exchanged glances, small chuckles. Gibson, who Hoosier still couldn't find it in himself to feel charitable towards, rang the little bell hanging from his rifle.

Hoosier looked over at Dog, watching him with her big brown eyes from atop her crate.

He reached a hand from his blanket cocoon and placed it atop her warm, soft head, rubbing behind her ears.

"Don't worry, pretty girl," he said quietly. "We'll make sure you're looked after."

She whined quietly as if she understood.

He wasn't a praying man, but in that moment, he sincerely prayed that he wasn't lying to her.

~~~

He was able to find someone who promised to look after Dog, a corporal from the 8th Marine Regiment who took one look at her curled up on her blanket and commented wistfully about how she looked just like his childhood dog. It didn't really take any effort at all to have the man agreeing to take care of her, a fond smile on his face as he stroked her head.

Hoosier still took a few minutes to say goodbye to her properly, pressing their foreheads together as Marines tromped happily around them, gathering up their packs and preparing to head towards the beach.

"You're a good girl," he said quietly, staring into her warm brown eyes. "And I'm sorry I have to go. It's not your fault, but I know you're probably gonna think you did somethin' wrong anyway."

He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, between her ears, and scratched under her chin.

"You're my best girl, Dog," he whispered, "I'm gonna miss you. You be good now, you hear?"

He gave her one last pat, forcing himself to stand upright and take a step back. Dog whined softly and stood up, ready to follow wherever he led, and Hoosier had to tamp down on the desire to whine back at her, or to scoop her up and carry her on the ship with him. Despite all of his sudden fantasies of somehow absconding with her to Australia and convincing some locals to get her shipped back to the States, he knew that she had to stay here. She'd be in good hands; the corporal from the 8th had already shown her off to some of his friends, who were suitably enthralled and excited to have a dog around.

That didn't stop Hoosier's heart from breaking when she immediately followed him as he turned to leave.

He looked over to the corporal, unable to speak around the lump that had suddenly taken up residence in his throat, but the corporal nodded as if he understood and knelt down to hold Dog in place.

Hoosier nodded back and forced himself to fall in with the rest of his company, doing his damndest to block out the sounds of Dog whining behind him.

He was so wrapped up in thoughts of Dog that it took him a while to realize that Leckie was watching him with a calculating expression.

"Can I help you?" Hoosier drawled, trying not to show just how wrung out and absolutely exhausted he felt.

They walked on for about another minute or so, trudging dutifully along in the muggy sunshine, before Leckie finally chose his words.

"You really care about that dog."

Hoosier snorted. "Ya think?"

Leckie didn't take the bait. "You do. You were...different with her. I haven't seen you like that before."

"You want me to treat you like a dog?"

When Leckie looked at him sidelong, his gaze was painfully, arrestingly shrewd.

"You treat dogs better than you treat most people."

"Yeah, well."

It wasn't an answer, and it appeared that Leckie refused to take it as one, simply watching Hoosier without a word until he felt the need to elaborate, "Dogs don't lie. They're genuine. They care about you if you care about them, and that's it."

He swallowed roughly and added in a lower voice, "I've always liked 'em better than people."

Leckie continued to watch him for a long moment and then nodded slowly, as if he understood. That seemed to be the end of it, as they walked on in silence for the next few minutes, watching their packmates up ahead, laughing and nudging at each other over some unknown joke.

Then, just as the beach came into view up ahead, Leckie asked in a low voice, "Is that how you normally act with your pack? The way you act with Dog?"

Hoosier damn near tripped over his own boots at that one, not only because the question was unexpected. He'd honestly never considered it before.

"I don't know," he said, hating how surprised and distant his voice sounded. "I've never really been close with my pack before."

That wasn't entirely true, but he didn't know how to articulate his relationship with his pack, how uncomfortable he felt around them even though he was quite literally born at their center. He didn't know how to express how much he loved his parents, how they were the only true pack he'd ever had, the only one he'd told himself he'd ever need. He had no idea how to say that he loved stray dogs more than he loved most people.

Not without sounding like a freak, at least.

He didn't have to express those sentiments, because then they were being shuffled onto boats that would take them to the ship, and their conversation was lost in the push and hustle.

He couldn't decide if he was pleased about that.

~~~

They all looked like shit warmed over, and wrapping himself up in a blanket and sleeping until they reached Australia sounded like a brilliant idea, but the rumor on the ship was that one could get coffee in the ship's canteen, even when it wasn't a mealtime.

After months with nothing but the miserable lukewarm instant excuse for coffee that occasionally featured in some of the better ration packs, none of them were willing to pass up the opportunity.

They watched with near desperation as the cook poured them each a cup of coffee. Leckie clutched his like a dying man who had found his salvation, and Hoosier imagined that he didn't look much better himself, hunched over his mug as he was, holding it close to his chest and breathing in its heavy aroma and only wishing that he'd brought his blanket to complete the perfect moment.

Distantly, he could hear the cook asking how "bad" it was, as if whatever the nightmare that had been those four odd months on Guadalcanal could be summed up with a word as gentle as "bad."

"Bad" was flunking your history test. "Bad" was missing your curfew and knowing your parents would tan your hide for bringing the car back late.

There wasn't really a good way to describe something like Guadalcanal to the sort of person who would ask if it happened to be "bad," because that sort of person was still existing in that pre-Guadalcanal state of naivety which they had all experienced to some degree or another, back when they were going to kill every single Jap and the emperor himself and get done so early that they could head over to Europe and do away with Hitler while they were at it.

There was no way to explain to that sort of person, someone whose idealism hadn't yet been shredded by the blood and guts and acrid gunpowder of reality, what it was like to live in a state of constant horror, of fear, what it was like to live with an exceptionally heightened awareness that you and all of your buddies could die at any moment and there might be nothing you could do to stop it.

There was no way for them to understand what it was like to watch the explosions in the distance, overhead, on the water, so beautiful in their destruction until they started coming towards you. There was no way that they could comprehend the sheer carnage and bloodshed, massacred friends and enemies alike mutilated and decaying in that god-awful sun, skin alive with memories and maggots.

Somebody who wasn't there would never understand the frightful majesty of the crocodile, nature's very own undertaker, or the suicidal desperation of a man who hated you so much that he would go let himself be flayed alive if it meant that he could take you down with him. They would never understand the hunger, the disease, what it felt like to be completely cut off from supplies and civilization and to know that you were entirely alone in a foreign land being hunted by an enemy who was better supplied, better prepared, better equipped.

And nobody but Hoosier himself would understand the agony of taking all of that in and making the decision to ensure their friends' survival, at any cost.

So yes, in a way, Guadalcanal had been "bad," but there was no way that someone who wasn't there could ever truly understand what "bad" meant.

And so Hoosier held his coffee to his chest, stared blankly at the table in front of him, and said nothing. His head didn't pop up until he heard the cook say that the 1st Marines were on the front page of every newspaper in America.

"You're heroes back home."

Hoosier exchanged brief looks with his pack as the cook walked off, before turning back to his coffee.

He wondered what his parents must think, what they had been reading and how it matched up to his reality.

He wondered what they would think of all of this, of what he'd been through, of what he'd done.

He wondered what they would think about his new pack and the circumstances that led him to the decision to create it.

He wondered if they would still see him as a hero then.

~~~

The people of Melbourne, at the least, seemed to view them as heroes.

Their arrival was nearly comical, the ship pulling into harbor to literal fanfare, complete with streamers and cheering, adoring locals, shouting their praises to lines of apathetic, exhausted Marines who had not one clue how to react to them.

Hoosier, for one, pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders. Sid was in front of him, leaning tiredly against the railing of the ship as he rubbed at his face, and Hoosier had to resist the sudden urge to offer up part of his blanket to him. It was neither the time nor the place for that, nor did he think Sid would take him up on that offer regardless of the circumstances.

Their journey to Australia was restorative in that they got regular meals that were reasonably warm and had the positive features of not being K-rations or filled with maggots. That, and there were no enemy combatants trying to bomb them at all hours of the day. All in all, it should have been relaxing, and in some aspects it was.

But Hoosier had learned his first time on a ship that wolves were not made for that sort of setting. It was too cold, too metallic, too  _unnatural_. He couldn't smell the earth or hear the birds or even find one single example of a living thing on board the ship that wasn't a human or the occasional rat. Wolves were not made to be at sea, and he could feel it acutely with every league they sailed, that visceral feeling of  _wrongness_  that took up residence around his heart and refused to leave, pulling tight like an ill-fitting belt and getting tighter all the while.

His pack did not appear to be experiencing these same problems. At the exact moments where Hoosier wished most that they could all shift so that he could bundle them up with blankets and hide them all away from the world until they could get off this godforsaken ship, his packmates were off exploring, playing cards with the other Marines, trying to scrounge up liquor and extra snacks. They didn't seem at all concerned with instincts, or with how every creak and groan of the ship made some feral, ancient part of what made them wolves want to search desperately for the nearest plot of dry land.

No, Hoosier was apparently alone in those feelings, just as he was increasingly alone in general. While he was not unwelcome to tag along with his friends, nobody questioned if he stayed behind in his bunk, only crawling out for meals or when absolutely forced. He felt disconnected, out of step with the others, and as he watched the many, many fawning ladies that came to greet their ship as it came into port, he couldn't help but think that those feelings were about to get a whole lot worse.

He held tight to his blanket and his sentiments as they loaded onto trucks that passed even more fawning well-wishers on the way to wherever they were to be billeted for the foreseeable future. This turned out to be, to his surprise and mild amusement, some sort of sports stadium.

"It ain't no Wrigley Field," he commented to Leckie, ignoring that he himself had never once been to Wrigley Field in his life. He'd seen pictures in the newspaper, and knew enough to know that this was most definitely not it.

He stared to half-heartedly unpack his bag when they reached their billeting area, until he found his hands knotted up in a Japanese flag he'd pilfered. He looked at it for only a moment before shoving it back in his pack along with everything else he didn't want to think about.

"Oh, the hell with this, I'm gonna sleep for a few days," he grumbled, slumping down on his bunk and curling up without ever once opening his eyes. It felt good just to lie down: his whole body felt like one giant ache, and even the thin, rickety cot was a vast improvement to sleeping in a ditch on Guadalcanal.

He tried to block out the sounds around him, sharp and too loud now that he'd shut his eyes. Every sound was grating, harsh and painful, and he was struggling more than usual to lower his senses or tune things out. He'd slept almost the entire time on the ship, and yet he still felt like he'd been run over by one of the trucks that had brought them to the stadium. The corpsmen thought that he had some sort of malarial illness, and he was all too willing to let them think that. He knew it wasn't malaria – he didn't have the shakes or the sweats, the coughing, the vomiting.

He was just absolutely exhausted, inside and out, and no amount of sleep seemed able to cure it.

His friends didn't seem to be too bothered. They quite literally ran at the first opportunity to explore Melbourne once they realized that the MPs wouldn't move one finger to stop them, and it wasn't like Hoosier could really blame them: who would want to stay behind with their not-really-sick friend when they could finally have some fun after months of hell? Especially when that friend was someone with whom they were still feeling pretty pissed off.

No, he didn't blame his friends one bit for wanting to go out on the town, but it still felt so pathetically nice when Runner ran back to pat him on the side and say, "Hey buddy, rest up, alright?"

Hoosier groaned, the verbal equivalent to waving him off, and listened carefully as Runner's steps faded away into the rest of the madding crowd. It wasn't long before the sounds of the stampede grew distant, and then faded altogether.

There weren't many people left in the stadium, he could tell without having to open his eyes. The MPs, a few COs, and a handful of miserable souls like himself, curled up on cots trying desperately to find some scrap of sleep in the broad daylight.

Despite his fervent attempts, sleep was a long time coming. Hoosier sighed and rolled over so that his back was facing the sunlight.

He missed Dog. He'd missed her since the moment he left her behind, but it was moments like this when he felt the loss most keenly, when he was exhausted and lonely and searching for a sleep that wouldn't come. Dog would have been curled up under his arm, wrapped up in her own blanket, her head up under his chin. She wouldn't have left him alone to go cavort around Australia – she would never leave him alone. Dog was one of the very few creatures in the world who he could ever definitively say liked him better than anyone else. If given the option, she would have stayed with him.

But he hadn't been able to stay with her, and so in a way he deserved to be in the position he was now, exhausted and alone, cold no matter how tightly he wrapped his blanket around himself.

Fuck it, maybe he did have malaria.

It would be better than whatever the fuck this was.

~~~

He barely registered his pack returning some time late at night, perhaps into the early morning. It was their familiar smells that woke him, just enough so that his heart could settle back into his chest with the knowledge that they were all safe and accounted for. By some grace of God, sleep found him easily after that.

That sleep was shattered with finality a few hours later by a rather sadistic rendition of reveille. Considering that Hoosier himself hadn't partaken of last night's festivities, he keenly felt that he shouldn't have been subjected to a shock loud enough that he'd nearly jumped out of his skin and into his fur, but the MPs never asked him for his opinion, nor did he think they would care.

It was a minor miracle that everyone found themselves mostly upright and at some level of attention a few minutes later, if "attention" was loosely defined to mean that everyone's eyes were somewhat open and they were standing of their own ability.

Hoosier brought his blanket with him. It had been his most steadfast companion this entire war, and he wasn't about to let go of it now just because the MPs wanted to have a go at being comedians. He wasn't in the worst shape of the group by far: he was fully dressed, he wasn't hungover, and he didn't fall flat on his face. Those weren't things that most of the others could claim, Corrigan included.

The man in question could only mumble an apathetic and disheveled, "Company dismissed," before wandering off.

This time, Hoosier wasn't the only man who immediately made his way back to his own bunk.

~~~

He should have realized that those first days in Melbourne were a sign of what was to come.

The boys were having the time of their lives, considering how freely drinks and just about everything else were offered up to the triumphant Yank heroes. Sid had a girl; Leckie had a girl; he didn't know about Chuckler and Runner but they certainly found somewhere other than the billet to spend their time. Most of the company only returned in the evening or for count, but snuck off again as soon as they were able. The MPs made half-hearted attempts to keep everybody corralled, but their raids into town looking for men on leave without passes seemed to be viewed more as sport by the Marines than an actual threat.

Hoosier never bothered to follow his friends on any of their excursions. He was mildly horrified to find out that he missed them when they were gone (and there was no way to say that without sounding pathetic), but it wasn't enough to convince him to go along with them. Even their company wasn't enough motivation to spend a day traipsing around the city, not when he felt this run down all the time.

It was as if a weight were physically pressing down upon him, making his whole body feel slow. Rolling out of bed for reveille was a hassle, going  _back_  to bed after reveille was a hassle – generally everything felt like a hassle, and he felt irritable for having to do it.

The corpsmen still thought he might be diseased, but weren't quite sure what to make of him seeing as he still wasn't showing the classic signs of malaria but didn't appear to be improving, either. One suggested that Hoosier might feel better if he tried being more physically active, going for a run or participating in calisthenics, but given how shitty he generally felt, the idea of running when nobody was chasing him (including a drill instructor) seemed extremely unappetizing.

He had a few suspicions about what was going on, none of which were theories that he could go and share with the United States military.

The first theory was that he was reacting poorly to being away from his pack. This was the weaker of the theories, because he had been away from his family pack back in Indiana for months without feeling like he had to sleep for a week (or two). It was true that he disliked his pack going out all the time without a care or concern, but they came back every night (well, everybody but Leckie), so it wasn't like he truly spent an extended period of time alone.

That brought him to the second theory: he felt like shit because some unconscious part of him had decided that he wasn't just separated from his pack, but that he was being actively  _rejected_  by them. That wasn't too far-fetched, seeing as they were still pretty angry with him, even if they didn't explode into arguments as often, and they didn't seem too concerned that he was allegedly ill while they were getting drunk at half the bars in Melbourne. It would be understandable if his instincts decided that he had been rejected and reacted with distress, seeing as rejection was the first step to becoming a lone wolf.

But he hadn't felt this way on Guadalcanal, when their actual rejection had been the most acute. He'd been upset, true, and frustrated and anxious, but in that instance he hadn't slept  _enough_. Right now he could name sleeping as his most important daily activity and when he woke up he felt tired enough that he often rolled over and went right back to sleep.

And when his pack was around, they would include him in whatever they were doing. Runner still checked up with him, however briefly, before he left, and the other day Sid had brought him back a candy bar. He wasn't excluded from meal times or conversations. It would be strange, then, for him to feel rejected.

That left only his third theory: that he hadn't shifted in well over a month, and it was throwing his body into turmoil. This seemed like it could be the most plausible option: he knew from experience that he felt pretty awful if he didn't shift regularly, and he hadn't had a safe opportunity to do so since he'd turned his pack. That was far too long for him to go without shifting, and his mother would be extremely disappointed with him if she knew (then again, she'd likely be extremely disappointed with many of his decisions of late).

Sneaking away to shift wouldn't be so hard to do, especially given how lax the MPs were. Shit, everyone would probably just be so happy to see that he was actually up and moving around for once that they'd open the door for him on the way out.

But there were still some issues with that theory, things that gave him pause. One was that in his past experience, putting off a shift for a long time made him feel anxious, like a pressure was building up under his skin making him jittery and irritable until he shifted or his body forced the shift upon him.

That wasn't at all how he felt now.

And the second problem...well, that one admittedly brought on some anxiety.

His pack members had not shifted since that first night, and it was quite clear that this did not bother them in the least. They were happy, smiling, laughing, having the time of their lives. A wolf – particularly a  _new_  wolf – should not feel that good when putting off a shift. They shouldn't have the  _control_  to put off a shift – shit, after this long they should have just upped and sprouted fur in the middle of the street weeks ago.

But nothing had happened. It was as if they had only had to shift the once, and now being a werewolf was only a footnote in their lives.

It was possible, and in fact increasingly likely, that everything that Hoosier had been told about changed wolves was completely wrong.

Everyone had always equated changed wolves to pups: the same lack of control over the shift, the same urge to shift regularly, the same need to be closer to the pack than a normal adult might. But then, nobody that Hoosier knew had ever actually  _met_  a changed wolf before. They had all heard stories, from people who heard stories. Nobody had firsthand experience.

Hoosier had that experience now, and he was realizing with dawning horror that perhaps nobody changed people into wolves because they didn't come out like true wolves at all. Maybe their instincts were all wrong: maybe they didn't really need to shift; maybe they didn't really need a pack. Maybe they only needed those things at first, when they were newly changed, and then they grew out of them. Maybe they were like a lighter version of werewolves, abbreviated, gaining some of the abilities but none of the instincts or imperatives.

Maybe he had turned his friends into werewolves, and now they didn't need him anymore.

 _That_  thought was enough to make Hoosier abruptly need to vomit so much that the corpsmen changed their diagnosis back to malaria.

He couldn't explain it, how viscerally horrible that thought made him feel, as if his lungs had seized and his heart had been torn out of his chest and his stomach had taken up residence in his throat. His hands shook, his pulse raced, he broke into a cold sweat.

This was, he realized, what heartbreak might feel like, and he felt this horrible just entertaining the notion that his pack didn't need him. He couldn't imagine what it would be like if that thought ever truly came to pass.

Lying in his cot, panting and dry-heaving into the bucket that the corpsmen had started keeping by his bunk back when they first considered malaria, Hoosier was struck with a stark realization that he could not deny:

He may have changed his friends, but it looked like they had changed him more.

The thought of losing his pack, of losing their favor, of them no longer needing him around, made him want to curl up in a ball and hide away from the world, and he didn't know what to do with those feelings. That wasn't  _him_ , that wasn't how he interacted with others, that's not how he cared about people. He wasn't supposed to feel that way; even back before he'd turned his friends, when he'd thought of their deaths and decided to do everything he could to prevent them, he'd still never felt as utterly wretched as he did when simply imagining that his friends could live their lives happy and carefree without him.

Was this what it was like to be an alpha? Was this what his mother felt like all the time? If so, he didn't want any part of it. He couldn't understand why anyone  _would_ , why some wolves would fight at times to the death to have the privilege of being a pack alpha. Why would anyone want to feel this miserable, this distraught and alone and unnecessary?

No, he didn't want to have anything to do with being an alpha. At this point, he didn't even want anything to do with being a member of a pack, not if it would make him feel like this.

But he no longer had that choice. He had made that bed (that cot, that hole in the ground) and he had to lie in it.

What he knew was this: he felt exhausted and tired all the time. He had not shifted in well over a month, and needed to. He missed his pack.

What he also knew: his pack felt perfectly fine and was, in fact, quite happy. His pack had also not shifted in well over a month, and didn't feel the need to. His pack did not feel any more separation than they would from a human friend.

There were very few conclusions he could make that contained positive prognostics for his future. Part of him wished that his pack would suddenly start feeling similar to him, if only because that would be a sign that they truly were his pack. But he wouldn't want to wish these feelings on anyone, especially not them.

Which meant that he had to accept the reality that his pack really may be different breeds of wolf than him. They really might not need to shift, or to be around their pack all the time. They really might not be able to understand his needs or what he was going through. (Given what he had done to them, they really might not care regardless.)

If they weren't truly wolves, if he had somehow failed to impart everything about being a wolf when he changed them...if they were somehow  _broken_ , or, or  _half-wolves_  or something else like that...well, then he couldn't understand them, and they most certainly couldn't understand him.

Worst of all, they might not have the protective factors of being a wolf that led him to change them in the first place. If they didn't have the same instincts, maybe they didn't have the same healing factors, the same speed, the same strength. Maybe it was slightly enhanced, but not as much as his – maybe it wouldn't be  _enough_  when the time came that they needed it.

There were so many things he didn't know, couldn't know, shooting around his head with dizzying fervor.

It was a good thing they'd given him that bucket, because he was going to need it.

~~~

The only thing on Hoosier's list of concerns that he could actually address was his own need to shift. The problem was that he wasn't sure of a safe way to go about it.

Ideally he would be shifting with his pack, where they could all look out for each other. But that wasn't really doable right now, seeing as he was trying to keep all of his problems as quiet as possible around them. For example, they didn't know of his new "malarial symptoms," as the corpsmen called them, and he didn't plan on letting them know, either. They still had problems with him after what he'd done, and he was lucky that they didn't outright hate him; he didn't really have a right to push his anxieties upon them.

No, these were things he had to deal with on his own.

He had originally planned to find a place in the city to shift, a nice park, some woods if he was lucky. But he was abruptly struck with the realization that he didn't know a thing about this city and its habits, particularly pertaining to what places were so uninhabited during the daytime that nobody would notice a wolf wandering around. He'd tried asking around the company, but everybody who knew of a park talked about how popular and well-trafficked it was – the exact opposite of what Hoosier needed.

In a strange city, with no easy place to shift and nobody to watch his back, it didn't look like a good, proper run was in the cards for him.

His safest bet was to find a place to hole up and shift, just enough so that he could stretch out, even if he couldn't go anywhere or do anything. It would be miserable, but it would get some of the urge to shift out of his system.

His prospects at the cricket grounds were pretty grim, but they were also, he reminded himself, his safest option.

And so it was that one day after his friends had left (teasing Leckie all the while about his hot date with a girl named Stella – and oh, but what would Vera think?), Hoosier finally hauled his sorry carcass out of his bunk and made his way slowly down the stairs and through the tunnel to the concourse under the stands. The MPs didn't even bat an eyelash, maybe because they were so used to seeing Marines leave, maybe because they thought it was amazing enough that he was walking around that they didn't want to discourage it.

Regardless, nobody made a single move to stop Hoosier as he crept off in search of a safe place to shift.

He ended up settling on, of all pathetic things, a broom closet. His mother would be beside herself with the indignity of it, but that was why Hoosier would never tell her about it.

The closet was dark and smelled little damp, but it was relatively tidy and was large enough that he could walk in and turn around. It was by no means luxurious, but it would do.

He shivered as he tugged off his uniform. The floor and walls were made of cement, and they carried with them a chill that would have normally been welcome in the dry heat of the Australian summer, were it not for how cold he always felt now. He resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself, and instead tried to remember that the faster he shifted, the warmer he'd feel.

He got down on his hands and knees on the cold floor, lifting his head to realize that he was at face-level with a well-used mop. He turned his head away, doing his best not to cringe at the rank, moldy smell, and reminded himself of why this was necessary.

The shift didn't come on as quickly as it normally would, and for a split-second, he almost feared that he had somehow forgotten how to do it. Then, after a few more moments of concentration, he finally felt the familiar burning tingle along his spine, between his shoulder blades, and then spreading along his limbs, a comfortable fire.

It  _did_  feel good to shift, as if he'd been confined in his human form for far too long. He was a little lightheaded when the shift was completed, unsteady on his legs in a way that he hadn't been since he was a pup.

The world swayed to the left, and Hoosier sat down with a decided  _thump_  to prevent any embarrassing – and noisy – falls. He then had to lie down almost immediately, because the scents of the chemical cleaners stored in the closet became nearly overwhelming. He'd noticed them upon entering the room of course, but had been able to tune them out of his mind. Now the burning, caustic smells felt as though they were physically assaulting him, making him dizzy and nauseous, and it was all he could do to very carefully lay down and curl into a tight ball, his nose tucked under his tail.

The room was even smaller as a wolf, given how his body was now spread out instead of upwards. Even curled up as he was, he still had a shelving unit pressing uncomfortably against his spine and a broom poking at his face, and there was nothing he could do to escape the chemical smells.

Biting back an embarrassing whimper, Hoosier tucked his head in tighter, clenched his eyes shut, and did his damnedest to fall asleep.

Nobody would ever know of this, he decided. But he wasn't sure that he would ever be able to forget.

~~~

Despite how it would cut into his napping time, when the orders came down from on high for the battalion to do training exercises in the Australian bush, Hoosier couldn't pack his gear fast enough. Melbourne had felt stagnant, marked by misery and insecurity and loneliness. He was more than ready to get back into a routine with his pack around him.

He was quite possibly the only man in the entirety of the Marines to feel that way, but he didn't really care. On the morning they were to set out, he was packed and dressed before anyone else.

When Leckie came strolling in late wearing his service uniform from another night out with his girlfriend, Hoosier couldn't help the spike of bitterness that hit him. Over what, he couldn't quite say, but that didn't stop him from chucking Leckie's boots at him.

"What, you thought Uncle Sam was going to pay for your great debauch forever?" he asked around the cigarette in his mouth, slinging his rifle against his shoulder.

Fuck, this was the most alive he'd felt since they set foot in Australia.

"Semper fi," he told Leckie, patting him on the shoulder as he passed him.

Leckie apparently wasn't feeling his delight, given his later behavior on the train. Hoosier stood back with his cigarette while the rest of the guys, including Gibson, bickered over the superiority of their old Springfield rifles and the new M1s. All of the guys aside from Leckie, who was in some sort of mood over leaving his girlfriend and had decided to separate himself from the rest of the pack.

Well, fine. It wasn't like he hadn't already spent a month showing how much he liked some random humans more than his pack.

It was when Leckie scolded them for Gibson shooting a cow that Hoosier realized his angst might actually be something of a problem. It was true that shooting the cow was stupid, and they were lucky that they were on a train full of stupid Marines so they probably wouldn't receive punishment for what had happened, but that didn't change that Leckie was pulling away, separating from them, just when Hoosier was starting to feel a bit more like he might be getting his pack back.

If only for Hoosier's own selfish reasons, Leckie had to get out of his own head and back with his pack, sooner rather than later.

When they were told that they had to march a hundred miles in three days on limited provisions in the dead of summer, Hoosier felt a little bit less enthusiastic. Only a bit, though: the pathetic, needy part of him was still ecstatic that for the next three days, his pack members  _had_  to spend time with him.

Christ, if and when they ever got out of this war, he was going to need to take a month where he lived alone as a hermit until he got all of these feelings out of his system.

(The feeling of dread and panic tried to fill him at this thought, and he quickly diverted it by forcing himself to listen to Sid and Runner's continued lobbying in favor of the Springfield.)

The march was one of the hardest they'd ever done, and they felt it at the end of the day. Hoosier had been living in a constant state of exhaustion, and yet he still couldn't believe how dog-tired (wolf-tired?) he was when they were finally called to stop for the night. He barely had time to eat anything before he was immediately dropping off to sleep.

One good thing about holding on to his faithful blanket: the outback got damned cold at night. It was amazing how swelteringly hot it could be during the daytime and how frigid it got when the sun went down. He could see Runner actually shaking with the cold, his blanket clutched tightly to his chest, and felt a pang of concern that he did his best to stifle. This wasn't exactly the best place to be fussing over his comrades.

But fuss he did, come morning, when both he and Leckie found their feet covered in huge, painful blisters that made it near-impossible to even walk, let alone march another day.

He hobbled over to Leckie, disheveled and exhausted, and brandished his knife.

"You first."

Leckie's face was somewhat disgusted and a little nervous as Hoosier readied his knife. He watched his expression for a moment and felt the smallest traces of a smile cross his face right before he moved. Draining the blister was rather disgusting, but a necessary evil.

Leckie made a noise of pain, soft and almost animal, before he gasped, "Oh, sweet Jesus, that feels good."

This time, as Hoosier watched his face, the smile was a little more noticeable, a little more pathetically fond. Christ, but he was fond of Leckie, even if he thought he was being an asshole lately. He was fond of all of his pack, stupidly so.

That did, actually, give him an idea. There wasn't a more natural, less-populated place than the middle of the bush, after all.

"I think we should go for a run tonight," he said in a low voice.

The look Leckie shot him let him know that Leckie was questioning his mental faculties and found them to be wanting.

"I'm sorry, I thought you said that you want to go  _running_  after we march thirty-three miles on foot. The lack of food and water must be getting to you, because otherwise you've lost your goddamn mind."

Hoosier huffed a sigh and glanced to the side, watching as Runner and Sid took turns trying to prod Chuckler into motion.

"I meant as wolves. I think we should go for a run as wolves."

Leckie reared back and blinked at him, his eyes widening.

"Okay, now I  _know_  that you've lost it. In what world would that be a good idea?"

Hoosier frowned, his eyebrows pinching into a glare.

"Where do you think we'd get a better chance? We're in the middle of nowhere, there's land to run around on and enough foliage for cover, there's no civilians around to see us, there's no  _enemy_  trying to kill us – there's not gonna be a better chance."

"Why would we have to do it at all?"

Now it was Hoosier's turn to rear back. All of those fears he'd spent the last few weeks ruminating on were now awake and alive, fluttering around in his stomach and his chest, squeezing at his heart.

In a voice that was far more desperate than he would have liked, he said, "You've gotta feel the push to shift. You've gotta feel  _something_."

He was afraid to see Leckie's reaction, afraid that it would be one of pity directed at how needy he must have sounded, but at the same time he couldn't tear his gaze from Leckie's, willing him to see things his way, to see that this was what they all needed.

Leckie stared at him long and hard, assessing, considering, and it reminded him abruptly of that foxhole on Guadalcanal, back when he'd first explained his reasoning for changing his friends and he was waiting for them all to pass judgment. Leckie had always been the most reasonable, the most pragmatic. If anyone would see the sense in it, he would.

After a long, long wait, he finally nodded. "Convince the others of it and find a way for us to do it without getting caught and I'll go with you. Now give me the knife, we've got to do your feet too and Stone wants us ready to go."

Hoosier nodded, grateful for more than one reason, and handed him the knife.

He tried not to think about how Leckie never admitted to feeling a need to shift.

~~~

Convincing the rest of the pack was by no means an easy feat, particularly given the context of their long march surrounded by their very human fellow Marines. He talked to Runner and Sid first, figuring correctly that they would be the easiest sells, especially once he told them that Leckie had agreed to it. Chuckler, who had claimed months ago that he never planned to shift again, was another deal entirely.

"Are you insane?" he hissed when they were finally allowed to stop to refill their canteens in a stream. "Do you want us to get caught?"

"No," Hoosier said with forced patience, "I want to show you all what it's like to go for a run, a real run, when you don't have to worry about Japs shooting you."

"Of course not, we just have to worry about our own guys shooting us!"

"It would be nice to give it a try," Runner interjected. The look Chuckler gave him was both irritated and mildly betrayed, and Runner in turn looked guilty just for making the suggestion.

Either not sensing or ignoring Chuckler's ire, Sid added quietly, "I  _have_  been feeling kinda itchy lately, I think maybe the, uh, the shifting might help."

It was a good thing that Hoosier had one hand holding his rifle and the other his canteen, because otherwise he would have done something stupid like try to throw his arms around Sid for more reasons than he'd like to critically examine.

Chuckler started to cave when considering that all of his friends would be going, but didn't fully give in until Runner suggested to him that it was perfectly okay if he stayed behind. It was that idea, being left out of something that his friends were doing, that got him to finally agree, and Hoosier didn't even put much effort into tamping down on the part of himself that rejoiced in seeing this as a sign of their need for the pack.

(He couldn't decide what would be worse, being alone in his need for the pack or actually being alone.)

He felt as if he was an expert in sneaking out of a camp by now, and it was made all the easier because they didn't have anyone on watch knowing that they were in a safe place. After a hard day's march, even the COs were ready to drop as soon as their heads hit the ground. Once everyone's breathing had evened out, Hoosier gestured a hand to his packmates to move. It was dark and there wasn't much ambient light from the moon, and he comforted himself that his packmates had to have  _some_  enhanced senses to be able to see his movements in the dark.

They left their boots behind, thinking that they might be too loud and would leave behind too many tracks. Barefoot and sore, they scrambled over the scrub-like dirt and towards the nearest stand of trees.

"Now what?" Runner whispered. The four of them were surrounding Hoosier, waiting for his call. It was a little strange, and he shook his head at it.

" _Now_  you lose your clothes if you don't want to rip 'em and you get into your fur."

Chuckler and Leckie both rolled their eyes at the last comment, and Hoosier bit his tongue against telling them that it was his mother's saying and that she wouldn't appreciate them mocking it. But this time everyone complied, including Chuckler, who perhaps after last time's pants debacle had realized the intelligence of stripping before shifting, so Hoosier couldn't complain too much.

There was a moment where they were all standing around naked as they days they were born except for their dog tags, looking anywhere that wasn't at each other, and this time Hoosier did scoff and roll his eyes.

"You gonna stand there all night till your balls freeze off or you gonna shift?"

He took his own advice and did so before any of them could protest or object.

It did feel good to have fur in the chill of the night, better than even his faithful blanket could be. And it was so much better than shifting in the broom closet, being able to feel the earth beneath his paws, flexing them so that his nails dug into the dry dirt. His lungs filled with fresh, clean air, untainted by manmade odors, and the sounds of the night surrounded him, nocturnal rodents skittering through the underbrush, a few birds fluttering overhead. It had been  _months_  since Hoosier had been able to shift for the sake of shifting and simply enjoy himself, and he intended to make the most of it.

Sensing his packmates still watching him from their human forms, he instead turned around and began trotting off into the woods.

They could stand there all night with their dicks out looking confused, but he was going to enjoy himself.

Less than a minute later he felt someone come up along his left flank and nose at his shoulder, snuffling loudly. He could tell by scent alone that it was Runner, and when he turned to face him, the smaller wolf's tail was wagging excitedly; if he'd been able, Hoosier was sure that he would be smiling.

Runner yipped loudly in surprise as teeth suddenly nipped at the end of his tail. Sid stood in all of his fluffy glory, Runner's tail caught gently in his mouth and his own tail wagging a mile a minute.

Hoosier huffed and watched as Runner growled and turned to nip at Sid, struggling to reach him as Sid moved with him, always a step out of reach and refusing to let go of his tail.

He in turn let out his own yelp as a huge grey wolf barreled into him, pressing Sid into the ground and then proceeding to actually sit on him. Chuckler seemed utterly unbothered by Sid's struggles and let out an exaggerated yawn.

Hoosier could only stare, stunned that Chuckler not only shifted that quickly, but was actually willing to play around. He was so busy watching as Chuckler teased Sid and made himself comfortable that he almost didn't notice Leckie's approach until the other wolf was sitting beside him.

He turned and met Leckie's gaze, just as shrewd and intelligent as it was at a human.

Or maybe Leckie just always had a wolf's eyes.

Leckie made an exaggerated attempt to nod at Hoosier, and it was such a human thing that Hoosier snorted again and teasingly nipped at Leckie's ear. Leckie recoiled in a look of utmost offense that was betrayed by his own slowly wagging tail.

Christ, but these guys wagged their tails more than half the dogs Hoosier had ever met, and he was so disinclined to ever direct them to do otherwise.

He was, after all, a big proponent of genuineness.

With a short bark he jumped to his feet, slammed his front paws against the ground once in a sign to play, and bolted of into the trees, tongue lolling out of his panting mouth as he did.

When he ran, the whole pack gave chase, yipping and barking behind him.

It was one of the best nights of Hoosier's life.

~~~

When they prepared to march the next morning, the rest of the company were sharing stories about the dingoes they heard the night before.

"I swear," Norcross drawled, "They sounded just like the wolves back home in Montana."

"There aren't any wolves in Australia," someone scoffed. "It had to be dingoes."

"I  _know_  that, I'm just saying, they sounded like wolves!"

Chuckler bumped up against Hoosier, and when Hoosier looked at him, he was smiling.

Hoosier barely noticed the blisters on his feet as they marched back to Melbourne.

~~~

Of course, the good times couldn't last. Upon returning to Melbourne, Leckie's girl dumped him. Leckie, in his infinite wisdom, decided to go out and get extremely drunk. And then  _Chuckler_ , in his own fit of genius, asked Leckie to take over for him on guard duty so he could take a piss, during which time Leckie managed to not only verbally disrespect Corrigan but also pull a weapon on him. He was quite frankly lucky not to get a court martial for that move, but he and Chuckler did win themselves time in the brig.

That couldn't be the end of it, because that would be too easy. Corrigan wasn't that compassionate, especially not towards Leckie.

No, that idiot had gone and gotten himself reassigned to battalion intelligence.

He was lucky it wasn't worse, a lot worse. He could have been shipped to another battalion, could have been drummed right out of the Marines if the higher ups really wanted to. A transfer to intelligence was a relatively lenient outcome.

But fuck,  _fuck_ , fuck it and fuck them and fuck Leckie in particular, because that was Hoosier's packmate being sent away from his pack, from  _their_  pack, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

"At least he'll still be around," Runner mumbled glumly as they once again readied to depart, this time to head back into combat. "It's not like he's in another battalion or something."

"And Corrigan won't be here to get on his nerves," Sid added, hauling his bag on top of his bunk and doing his best to shove everything inside it.

Chuckler remained silent, slumped on his bunk and darting occasional glances at where Leckie was talking to his new CO. It was clear that he felt guilty about what had happened, and part of Hoosier was pleased with that, wanted him to feel ashamed of himself because who in their right mind would trust someone as piss-drunk as Leckie was with a firearm and weapons duty?

But then, it was also Leckie's fault for going out and  _getting_  that drunk all on his own without anyone to watch his back, which in turn was all because he had to go and get attached to a girl who he knew from the start he'd have to leave behind when they shipped out again.

There was stupidity all around, but laying blame didn't matter, because what was done was done. Leckie was transferred out of their company, away from their pack, and there was nothing they could do about it.

"Well," Leckie said as he approached, "It looks like I won't have to spend so much time looking at all of your ugly faces."

Runner and Sid gave token laughs; Chuckler nearly flinched.

 _At least someone else cares that your pack is falling apart_.

No, the pack wasn't falling apart, but Hoosier wasn't sure what it  _was_. Chuckler was the only one showing even mildly the appropriate amount of concern that one should have about their pack member being forcibly taken away, but given his general attempts to reject everything that it was to be a wolf, Hoosier couldn't assume that his silence was because he felt the same way as Hoosier did. Chances were, he was just guilty about being separated from his friend – not his packmate.

And if Hoosier was the only one concerned about the pack...well, it said a thing or two about some of his theories.

"Don't let the door hit you on the way out," he told Leckie, keeping his eyes the entire time on the cigarette he was lighting.

He told himself that the aching, burning feeling in his chest was from the shitty cigarettes and nothing more.

~~~

Their time on the ship was surreal. Christmas finally came, sans all of the accoutrements they'd been sent at the end of their time on Guadalcanal, but with the addition of mandatory holiday carols. There was something supremely strange about a bunch of Marines sitting on the deck of a ship bound for a blood-stained warzone, singing happy church songs about joy and redemption.

It felt even stranger given the pit of unease that had taken up residence in Hoosier's gut after Leckie's transfer.

On the ship they did not yet have many differentiated duties, and so things hadn't changed much, but the sense of foreboding was there, the knowledge that their time for things as they had been was now limited. The others seemed irritated and upset with the change, but none of them seemed to quite understand what it could be like, to have a pack member taken away where you might not be able to protect them.

Maybe this was what his parents had felt when he told them that he was enlisting in the Marines.

If so, he owed them his thanks for not just hogtying him in his bedroom until the war was over.

He started smoking more on the ship, partially because it seemed to calm him down and partially because it gave him something to do with his time other than fretting about a future that didn't seem to really bother anybody else.

Nobody else seemed to think that there was a problem, and so he told himself that he wouldn't, either.

That, like all things, was much easier said than done.

Cape Gloucester was peaceful when they first arrived, but then, as Runner pointed out, so was Guadalcanal.

And they all knew how long that had lasted.

One major difference from Guadalcanal was that they were to sleep in hammocks suspended from poles, high enough to keep them off of the ground. Supposedly, given the amount of rodent activity on the island, it wasn't in anyone's best interest to be sleeping on the ground.

That wasn't foreboding at all.

The one positive was that Leckie's current CO had told him to attach himself to any patrol he wanted – naturally, he had chosen to attach himself to H Company. Stone warned them all not to think that they were getting out of patrols just because they were machine guns and mortars, but Hoosier had to hold back a smirk: the one thing that he currently  _wasn't_  worried about was patrols.

It was much easier to patrol for the enemy in a dense, wooded forest when you were also the sort of creature made to hunt in a dense, wooded forest.

The others had a bit of a learning curve to go through. They hadn't spent their entire lives honing their instincts so that they could quickly differentiate between the sound of a rat running through the undergrowth and the sound of a human lying in wait, how to pick up a scent trail and recognize how old it was and what it might be. Part of him, one of the dumber, more hopeful parts, was almost giddy with the thought of all of the things that he could teach them.

It wasn't easy to impart any of those lessons during their patrols, given the necessity for silence, but Leckie, at least, learned something about why the rear position was important: when you were hunting prey with teeth and claws, you had to be careful that they didn't start hunting you instead.

He was proud of Leckie for what he'd done, for waiting out the enemy until they came to him and possibly saving the rest of the patrol in the process.

He didn't tell him that, of course. Things had been so odd and strained with Leckie since his breakup in Australia, and it wasn't like Hoosier was the type to shower people with praise. He settled for patting Leckie on the shoulder as he walked past him.

It only took one night to realize the other major reason why their bunks were kept off the ground: whatever experience they thought they had with rain on Guadalcanal, it was nothing compared to the rain on New Britain. Even rain gear only stayed dry for so long before that too was soaked through. The ground flooded regularly, every step sending up a splash of water and causing boots to sink into thick mud. This was no place for digging foxholes, not if you didn't want to drown in it overnight.

Hoosier may have missed the great outdoors during their stay in Melbourne, but he certainly had not missed the rain. He couldn't stand constantly feeling wet, never truly being able to dry out his clothing before it rained again. Wolves would go to ground and wait out a storm; he couldn't do that here, and his instincts chafed at it.

And goddammit, but he couldn't even keep his cigarettes dry.

The rain also threw off his senses. It was so loud, bouncing off of trees, tarps, tents, that it was difficult to pick out other sounds. The water and the constant motion disturbed scents as well, washing away preexisting smells and keeping them from transmitting clearly through the air.

It was a nightmare watching the trees that night, trying to pick out where the Japs might be coming from when the foliage was already constantly shifting with the wind and the rain.

And then in a flash of lightning and gunpowder they appeared, calling out a battle cry as both sides opened fire. The only light came from muzzle flashes and the storm itself, intermittent bursts outlining scenes of carnage, trees exploding in shatters of wood and humans exploding in spatters of dark, dark blood.

Everyone kept shouting, the Japs, the gunners, shouting war cries, shouting in pain. The smell of copper was thick in the air, and Hoosier had to repress his own growl, tamping down on the urge to let it all overwhelm him into a shift. He felt useless with a rifle, only able to truly aim when lightning and explosions lit the night, knowing that he could see and attack so much better as a wolf than as a human.

That wasn't an option though, never would be one, and so he had to settle for shooting at what he could see as well as what he couldn't.

When the call for a cease fire came, the world fell dark, and everyone waited with baited breath for signs of movement in that rain. After a few moments of inactivity, they allowed themselves to sigh with relief.

He could see Chuckler and Runner slump against each other in relief behind a machine gun, their faces brought into high relief by another bolt of lightning, and couldn't help the errant thought that the next time, they might not be so lucky.

~~~

There was something fascinatingly macabre about watching the carrion birds pick at the corpses the next morning. Huge, fearsome birds of prey, willing to look you directly in the eye as they ripped a piece of flesh off of another human being. If the crocodile had been an undertaker, these were his assistants.

That seemed to be an omen for the rest of the day, the destruction of man. Hoosier wasn't on the patrol where Gibson strangled a Jap with a smile, but he heard about it later. He saw the way it affected Leckie, the way he ruminated as his gaze followed Gibson around the camp.

The voice in his head was supremely satisfied that his reservations about Gibson had been vindicated.

_You knew, you knew there was something wrong. Just imagine if he was your packmate, what you would have had to do._

He had no interest in pursuing that train of thought any further.

He did feel somewhat guilty for his thoughts, if only because he knew that his packmates were taking it hard, the seeming loss of their friend (and once word got around about what had happened, it was likely only a matter of time before the brass stepped in).

Watching Leckie stare out into the rain, undoubtedly still watching Gibson, Hoosier called to him and held up the Jap pistol Leckie had found.

"I'll give you just about anything for this."

Hoosier didn't spend a whole lot of time souvenir hunting, but even he knew a quality prize when he saw it. Jap officer's weapons were no easy thing to come by.

He was almost entirely sure that Leckie would deny him, but the distraction might be worth it.

"I don't even want you touching it," Leckie said, the corner of his mouth quirked up in a grin.

Hoosier watched him carefully, but still returned the gun to Leckie's chest.

"Fuckin' rain never ends," Sid complained as he entered their tent. He and Leckie immediately returned their gazes to Gibson, struggling with his hammock in the rain.

One step forward, two steps back.

"Gibson's okay," Sid said, his words more for Leckie than any of the rest of them. "He's just tired."

"No wonder you guys don't talk about Guadalcanal, you didn't do anything. Apparently John Basilone did everything."

Chuckler cursed under his breath and Runner shook his head. Hoosier tried not to strain himself with how hard he rolled his eyes.

Loudmouth, as Leckie had named him early on in his tenure, was a replacement who had joined H Company just before they shipped out to Cape Gloucester. He also had a tendency to add his opinion into just about everything, as obnoxiously as possible, hence his nickname. For some reason that Hoosier suspected was actually the machinations of a spiteful God, he had attached himself to the pack in particular and like all limpets, took no notice of when he wasn't welcome.

"We all did shit like that," Hoosier said, tapping the damp comic, "And without all the grimacing."

Loudmouth, true to form, only laughed.

"Now he's back home selling bonds and dicking blondes while you're still here in paradise."

He was all too pleased to watch Loudmouth exit the tent, lighting his cigarette as he frowned after him.

"Good fuckin' riddance," he muttered around his cigarette.

His pack only laughed.

~~~

The Japs seemed to disappear after that, melting away into the jungle without a trace.

When the Japs left, the rain came, somehow worse than before. It was constant, the ground saturated to the point of standing water all around the camp. Mud was up to the ankles at best and the knees at worst. Everyone spent their time holed up in their tents unless absolutely forced outside.

Certainly nobody was volunteering for patrols now.

He watched Chuckler try fruitlessly to relight the burner so that they could make coffee, another match sizzling out against the wet metal.

"All this water coming down, you didn't think to cover that up?" Hoosier growled.

Chuckler cursed and tossed the soggy match, going for another.

"A live grenade just happens to roll into his tent," Leckie mused, staring out the entrance of the tent as he ate from a can of beans. "It's a damn shame."

"Will you please shut up?" Hoosier grumbled.

Leckie's hatred of authority figures was back in fine form. They had hoped that after Corrigan he might calm down some, but he was irritable with Stone and downright ornery with Larkin, the intelligence CO. Larkin was a bastard, to be sure, and anyone would be pissed to have their souvenirs commandeered, but Leckie never knew when to leave well enough alone. There was no arguing with a CO, no matter what they did to you.

Leckie was never quite able to get that idea through his head, and he had to demonstrate it, loudly and often.

"This is a dangerous place," he mused. "Any number of accidents could befall someone like Lieutenant Larkin. Terrible loss for our forces overseas."

"Oh, for God's sakes, coffee is the one goddamn thing we got to enjoy around here," Hoosier snarled. "We just want to enjoy it in peace. So either kill Larkin or shut the fuck up."

Leckie glared at them all, his expression darkening as only Chuckler would meet his gaze, and even then only for a second. With a dramatic flair to let them all know that he was pissed, he stomped out of the tent.

Nobody went after him, but right now, nobody wanted to.

~~~

Maybe they should have gone after him, just to keep him from doing something else stupid. Leave it to Leckie to steal the chest back and then get into an argument over semantics when Larkin assigned him to the officer's mess.

And when it rained at Gloucester, it fucking poured, so of course that was when Leckie started having problems with wetting himself in his sleep, and of  _course_  it was Larkin who was the one to point it out, in public.

Hoosier didn't have to see Leckie's face to sense his horror, his absolute mortification, and in that moment he felt some of the same ire towards Larkin that Leckie did.  _Nobody_  got to upset  _his pack_  like that and get away with it.

He could feel Chuckler bristling as well, growling softly, too low for Larkin to pick up but plenty loud for Hoosier's ears, and that was what drew him back to reality. He shoved an arm in front of Chuckler, shaking his head without looking at him.

This was the problem with being wolves in a human military: they really did have to take slights like that lying down. There was no standing up for your packmates, not when they fell afoul of the brass – and goddamn him, but Leckie kept committing punishable infractions that they had no way of defending.

It was Runner who approached Leckie first, grabbing his own, cleaner blanket and draping it around Leckie's waist where he stood, still frozen, next to his bunk.

"C'mon, cobber," he murmured, "Let's get you cleaned up and go see the corpsman."

It was a testament to how shaken Leckie felt that he didn't argue or resist once, just docilely let himself be led away.

The corpsman said that all Leckie could do was try to keep himself dry, which was a sick joke given their current predicament. Then Leckie was the one to watch Lebec shoot himself in the head, naked in the rain, and that just about fucked up any chances of Leckie getting back to normal anytime soon.

He was quiet after that, quiet and prone to staring blankly ahead of him, wordless and unseeing, and Hoosier almost missed all the bitching about Larkin. It was eerie, not to hear him talking their ears off about one thing or another.

The others noticed, too, sticking closer to Leckie, keeping an eye on him. Someone was with him at all times if they were available, just sitting with him if they couldn't engage him in conversation. They were looking out for their own.

For once, they acted something like a pack.

That actually gave him an idea.

He walked into their tent one grey, dreary morning, when the rain had finally stopped for an hour or two.

"C'mon, we're goin' on a team building exercise."

"A fucking  _what_?"

He'd expected that sort of response, and so he held firm, brooking no arguments.

"Up." He tugged at the back of Sid's collar, hauling him to his feet. "C'mon, rain's gonna come back eventually, we don't have all day."

"Where are we going?" Runner asked, and Hoosier loved that he didn't argue about  _if_  they were going, just started shoving his feet into his damp boots.

"It's a surprise."

"I don't like surprises," Chuckler said with a glower, which was a goddamn lie because Chuckler fucking  _loved_  surprises.

"You do now. C'mon, let's go, Lucky."

With some pushing and prodding he got Leckie into a standing position. He didn't say anything, but he yanked himself away from Hoosier's hands and glared at him, so at least he still had some fire left in him.

Once Runner and Sid followed him out of the tent, he knew that the other two wouldn't be long. They trailed behind him as he made his way into the jungle, keeping a careful eye to make sure that nobody was watching them and that they were headed in the opposite direction of where Japs had last been sighted. The last thing they needed was to trip over their wayward enemies when he was trying to lighten things up a bit.

After they had traveled a suitable distance from the camp, Hoosier turned and looked at his packmates.

They stared back at him.

"Well?" he asked.

Chuckler frowned. "Well what?"

"Don't just stand there. C'mon, we're going for a run."

"What,  _now_?"

"No, I thought next Thursday might be nice.  _Yes,_  now. You all look like the sorriest sons of bitches I've ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on and it's fuckin' depressing, so we're gonna shift and we're gonna stay shifted until you've run some of it off."

He didn't tell them that this is what his parents used to do with him as a child, when he had a bad day at school and refused to talk about it.

"Well," his father would say, "There's only one thing for it."

Then he'd haul Hoosier up in his arms and carry him outside. Hoosier would grumble and complain at first, but by the time they made it to the woods behind their house his father would have him letting out a few reluctant chuckles.

And once he'd shifted...well, that was when everything was suddenly right with the world. It didn't matter what season it was, whether snow was on the ground or spring was in the air, they would go for a run, and when they got back, everything that had been so upsetting before wouldn't seem so bad anymore.

That was what he wanted for his pack, even if he didn't say it.

He just wanted things to be better.

As always he led by example, knowing that nobody would move unless he did it first. To his surprise Sid was right there with him, shucking off his clothes and folding them neatly, finding a semi-dry log to lay them on.

Sid looked back at the other three, who were watching him in surprise.

"Well, I don't know about you guys, but if I spend one more minute in that goddamn tent I swear I'm gonna lose my mind."

"Is there anything left to lose?" Runner grumbled, but he finally started to follow suit.

Chuckler looked at Leckie, and Leckie looked at nothing in particular. Then, miracle of miracles, he mumbled, "Fuck it," and started stripping too.

After that, it wasn't a question that Chuckler would play along.

They were unsure of themselves at first, of how they would fair in the thick jungle and the patches of slick mud that were nearly impossible to avoid. It only took slipping once to have Chuckler slumped in the mud, huge and growling and wearing a snarl that would have been menacing had he not had mud dripping down his face.

Leckie actually barked at that, his tail swaying slowly, the most engagement he'd shown in pretty much anything all day. If he was human, he'd probably have been laughing.

As it was, Chuckler very clearly picked up on the gesture, wasting no time in lunging at Leckie. Leckie attempted to make a run for it but couldn't get any traction, and he yelped as Chuckler collided with him, sending the both of them sliding through the mud.

Hoosier huffed softly, watching as the pair attempted to stand. The burnt brown of Leckie's coat did a much better job of masking the mud than Chuckler's pale grey, but Chuckler didn't seem to notice this, seeing as he then proceeded to try to lick the mud off of Leckie's face. He only tried that for a moment before he reared back in shock, whining to himself as he realized that mud actually tasted pretty awful.

Leckie's tail was wagging properly now, his amusement palpable. Chuckler grumbled, but his own tail was moving too, and Hoosier had the realization that the whole sequence had probably been intentional.

It had worked though, had Leckie growling back playfully and nipping at Chuckler's ears.

There was a splashing noise just as cold water was flung across Hoosier's back.

He couldn't help letting out a yelp of surprise, but quickly spun with a growl to search out the culprit.

He didn't expect to see that the guilty party wasn't even paying attention to him.

Runner pounced on another puddle, his dark paws sinking into the standing water and sending it spraying up all around him. He barked and did it again, slamming his feet into the puddle like a pup trying to get someone to play with him.

When he saw that he had Hoosier's attention he barked, his tail a black blur. Before Hoosier could even respond he barked again and flung himself into another puddle, this time splashing Chuckler and Leckie and distracting them from their grumbling.

Everyone was still for a moment, and then Runner made a break for it, the other two quick on his tail. Sid barked and ran after them, and fuck it, someone had to look after those losers.

Hoosier would never admit that when he ran after his pack of idiots, his tail was wagging, too.

~~~

The next day there were rumors around the camp that dog tracks had been found in some of the mud near the camp. Whispers of the bloodthirsty Jap attack dogs made a rapid resurgence.

Hoosier lay on his back across his bunk and laughed himself silly.

~~~

Pavuvu was different than Gloucester.

For one, there weren't any Japs there, so they were able to live in a real camp again, with cabin-like tents complete with doors and floors and mosquito netting; there were real bunks and the food was somewhat hot. For another, it didn't rain quite as much, which after the waterlogged hellhole that was New Britain, was a more than welcome change.

That was about where the positives ended.

The rodent population on Pavuvu was healthy and thriving, with various rats and mice running freely throughout the camp. To make matters worse, pretty much the whole island smelled of the sickly rot of decaying coconuts and crabs. If it was bad enough that humans complained of the stench, one could only imagine how much worse it was for a wolf.

And that wasn't the worst of it.

Runner came down with a horrible case of malaria. He was pale and shaking, sweaty, coughing all the time, barely able to keep down food and water. He complained of being too warm, and then was too cold, even when wrapped in all of the blankets that they could gather. This time there was no doubt that it had to be malaria.

Hoosier's initial reaction was to reject the diagnosis, because the whole point of changing his friends into werewolves was to prevent exactly this situation. How the fuck did it even happen? They were supposed to be stronger than that, they were supposed to be  _protected_  against that!

Was that not why he'd done all of this in the first place, to keep them safe?

He could tell that that was what his packmates were thinking, even if they wouldn't say it in Runner's vicinity. They would give him angry looks as they spread another blanket over Runner, ran a hand over his hair, held a cup of water to his lips because his hands shook too much to hold it steady.

"You said we were supposed to be better than this," Leckie drawled idly one day, watching Runner shake violently.

He blew out a plume of smoke.

"But look at us now. We're all fucked up."

Hoosier glowered at him from across the tent.

"I said it would make you stronger against diseases," he said, trying and likely failing not to sound defensive. "I didn't say it was a fucking miracle worker."

He didn't mention how this played so well into his fears that changed wolves were not quite "full" wolves.

"No, I remember you acting like it was a fucking miracle worker," Chuckler said from his bunk. "That was the point, right? That we'd be stronger, better off? But you said it couldn't help us if we got shot-"

"Not if you got shot  _fatally-_ "

"-and it obviously can't keep us from getting sick. What, we don't get as many fucking sores? So what? Runner's got malaria and Lucky – Lucky's miserable, and we've got all of this shit on top of being fucking  _monsters_. If you can't even keep us safe from disease, then what the fuck was the point of making us like you, huh? Unless that's it. Unless the whole point is so you don't have to be alone."

Hoosier was shaking, but unlike Runner, it wasn't due to illness. He swallowed thickly, his throat tight, his tongue too large for his mouth.

He didn't know what to say. He didn't have a response to that. There was nothing he  _could_  say to that, because Chuckler was right: being wolves hadn't done anything to benefit them. It had upset them, and given them a secret to hide, and made them hate Hoosier, but it had done absolutely nothing of benefit – at least, not of benefit to them.

If being werewolves couldn't stop them from getting fucking malaria, how was it going to help them survive the war?

Maybe Chuckler was right. Maybe he did really do it all just so he'd have other wolves with him in the war, and he'd lied to himself about his reasoning. It would make sense, after all: he would openly admit that he was selfish.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, eyes wide, unable to stop that goddamn trembling in his hands, his voice. "I...I was wrong. I shouldn't have changed you guys, and I'm – I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

He turned and walked out of the tent, nearly running into Sid, who had frozen in the entryway, his own eyes nearly bulging out of his head.

"Hoosier?" he started to ask, but Hoosier only shook his head. He moved around him, careful not to touch, and he left. He didn't know where he was going or what he planned to do, but he had to get out of there. He couldn't stand looking at them one moment longer, having them look at him and having it all out in the open, everyone acknowledging the mistake he'd made, how he'd irreparably affected their lives for the worse.

Christ, but he could never tell his mother about this. She would be so ashamed.

The only good thing, he thought as he walked blindly into the woods, paying no attention to where he went as long as it was  _away_ , was that they didn't seem to feel the affects of being a wolf nearly as strongly as he did. They didn't need the pack as much, didn't feel much if any urge to change. They would be alright without him around. They would get by, take care of each other.

He stripped as quickly as possible, starting to shift before his pants were fully removed, and as soon as four feet hit the ground, he ran.

He ran and ran, not paying attention to where he went or making sure he avoided patrols or shit, even Japs. He ran until his muscles burned and his vision blurred and he could barely see or think or feel, and then he ran some more.

When he finally stopped, collapsing to the ground, panting and exhausted, he had no clue where he was and the sun was starting to set over the jungle.

Well, fucking good. Maybe if he was lucky a Jap would shoot him as he dragged himself back to camp, and then they would all be put out of his misery.

~~~

There was no way to avoid his friends back at camp, not when they were all billeting in the same tent, but he did his best to stay out of the way.

He may not have realized it, but Chuckler really was a good pack leader, a good alpha. He took care of Runner, and now that he was on the mend, he was looking out for Leckie as well as his condition worsened. It was Chuckler who stepped in and brought a corpsman when Leckie's enuresis got so bad that he couldn't even be roused from his bed. And when Leckie was gone, it was Chuckler who comforted the others, assuring them that things would get better, that Leckie would rest up on Banika and come back in a week or two better than ever.

Hoosier just did his best to stay the fuck out of the way.

Nobody ever came looking for him, so he figured they were happy with the arrangement.

He went for a lot of runs when he could manage it. Their position was fairly secure, and so patrols were light and less frequent, making it easier for Hoosier to slip away and shift.

Shifting was just about the only thing that made him feel normal anymore, the only place where he could get out of his head and let instinct take over and turn off his thoughts, if only for a few minutes.

It was this release from his normal sensibility that led to him getting caught.

Through only sheer dumb luck did it turn out that the officer crouched next to his abandoned clothing turned out to be a wolf himself.

Hoosier could smell it as he approached, slowing his pace and peering out from the brush. The man was clean-cut and well-kempt, but nothing could hide the scent of a wolf, wild and sharp. That also meant that he could undoubtedly smell Hoosier, even if he didn't hear him approach.

"It's okay to come out, Marine," he said in a soft, even voice. "You're not in any trouble. I certainly couldn't fault you when I was planning to come out here to do the same."

In an obvious gesture of trust and vulnerability, the officer sat down on the leaf-strewn ground, leaning his back against a tree and resting his arm across one propped knee.

Slowly, warily, Hoosier crept out of the foliage and into the open.

The officer cracked a genuine smile, as if he were truly happy to see Hoosier, which was beyond strange. While Hoosier had accepted before going to war that there was a chance he could meet other wolves in the Marines, the main accepted practice when meeting another wolf on neutral territory was to keep a respectful distance and remain cordial.

This...this was unorthodox.

"There you are," the officer said, still sounding pleased. "I knew I'd smelled someone else around camp but I hadn't been able to pin down exactly who it was. That's the problem of living on top of each other and sharing all of the same facilities, I guess."

He shrugged, easy as you please.

"Do you feel like shifting so that we could have this conversation face to face?"

He made it sound so reasonable, so simple. He made it sound like he'd actually enjoy it.

Hoosier wasn't one for trusting new strange wolves who showed up out of the blue acting like they wanted to befriend him, but he also didn't have many options – the man had his clothes, after all.

The only thing in favor of him not getting killed was that it would be messy and hopefully an officer would think twice before killing another Marine.

(Thinking back on some of the officers he'd known, that thought wasn't quite so reassuring.)

He ducked forward, just close enough to snatch up his pants and skivvies and tug them a few yards away. Once there, he executed a quick shift and immediately pulled on his clothes, keeping his eyes averted until he was finished.

When he glanced up, still in need of his shirt and boots, the officer was smiling again, though he'd pulled himself to his feet.

"You keep your dog tags on when you shift," he said.

Hoosier hadn't really given it much thought before, but he shrugged.

"If I get killed as a wolf and shift back once I'm dead, that way they'll know who I am when they find my body."

The officer laughed quietly. "That's not a bad idea, actually. I just liked the irony of it. Dog tags on a wolf and all."

Hoosier bit back a remark about how Runner had made a similar comment once, and instead said nothing.

The officer was unperturbed.

"What's your name, Marine?"

Well, there was no going back now, anyway.

"Private First Class Bill Smith, sir. How Company, 1st Marines."

"Bill," the officer said, still smiling as he offered his hand. "I'm Captain Andrew Haldane, K-3-5. It's nice to meet you."

Hoosier eyed his hand warily. Officers didn't offer their hands to enlisted men; it just wasn't done.

Then again, neither were supposed to be werewolves, so that probably negated a few social mores.

Slowly, he reached out and shook the man's hand.

That was apparently the right choice, if Haldane's continued smile meant anything.

"It's nice to find another wolf out here. I don't think I've met anyone else in...gosh, since I first left the States, I think."

Hoosier nodded carefully, unsure of how much he wanted to say.

Haldane took the choice away from him.

"What about you?"

He could always lie, of course. The only problem was that some wolves were exceptionally good lie detectors, noting even the smallest of changes in scent or behavior, and Hoosier had a more than sneaking suspicion that Haldane was one of them.

"I've met a few."

When he failed to elaborate, Haldane only raised an eyebrow, waiting for him to go on.

Hoosier sighed, averting his gaze.

"I, uh, may have turned some of my friends."

That certainly got Haldane's attention; his head actually reared back in surprise.

"You  _what_?"

Part of Hoosier wanted to be defensive, the part of him that scolded him night and day that he was supposed to be taking care of his pack, even if they didn't want him there, even if he'd already done too much.

The other part of him, the part that had been drowning in guilt for days, knew that he deserved whatever reaction he got.

"I turned my four friends thinking that it would keep them safer. Didn't work, obviously. Two of them got pretty sick, one had to be shipped off to a hospital for a few weeks, and they all hate me for changing them. Only good thing is that they barely have any instincts so they can ignore it for the most part."

Haldane stared at him for a long, long time. Hoosier couldn't help shifting uncomfortably, feeling exposed without his shirt when normally he couldn't care less. Everything about Captain Haldane screamed alpha, and a sensible one at that. He was the kind of man who anyone would hate to disappoint, and Hoosier had a feeling that he'd just said a few extremely disappointing things.

After that uncomfortably long silence, Haldane shook his head, and then cracked a small smile. "Well that sounds like a mess. Why don't you tell me about it and we'll see what we can do?"

To Hoosier's own personal amazement, he did.

It was painfully easy to speak to Captain Haldane, seated side by side on the ground like little kids, maybe because the man himself was so personable. He nodded in all the right places, asked questions when he needed to, and was always willing to wait out Hoosier's silences or give an encouraging smile. He spoke more in those few minutes than he probably had in a month.

And perhaps the most surreal thing of all: when he was done speaking, Haldane put a hand around the back of his neck and squeezed comfortingly.

Hoosier nearly went boneless, partially from the sheer shock of it.

Nobody had done that since his mother. Nobody had taken control, nobody had helped him out, nobody had treated him like  _pack_  since his mother, and the sudden realization was almost heartbreaking.

"I think I can understand some of your problem," Captain Haldane was saying, a sympathetic look on his face. "I think you do have a pack, but they have no clue how to be a pack."

"They don't  _want_  to be a pack," Hoosier corrected.

"And that's another issue, but not one that we can fix. You can and should apologize and make amends, but we can't change what's been done. And right now, you have a pack that needs you."

Hoosier snorted and started to reject the idea again, but Haldane squeezed the back of his neck once more and he had to tamp down on his voice before it came out as a squeak.

"I'm serious. They need someone to show them how things are done, to model good pack behavior for them. They probably wouldn't even know how to identify  _what_  they were feeling if something told them that there was a problem with their pack. They need you to show them the ropes, not to help them ignore what happened."

"You're forgetting that they don't  _want_  me to show them. They don't want to be wolves."

Haldane was silent for a minute, his hand moving almost absently over Hoosier's bare spine, the same slow, soothing motion his parents made when he was a kid. (The same gesture he tried to emulate with his pack, that first time.)

"I've thought about changing some of my own men before," he finally said. "Even told my lieutenant about what I am. I've got all the same reasons that you do: I care about my men, and I don't want to see them hurt, not when I can help them be stronger, have a better immune system, give them better eyesight, better hearing, reflexes. Anything to help them get through this war alive. My problem is that if I changed one of them, I don't think I'd be able to stop myself from trying to change them all. A Marine leaves no man behind."

He quirked a wry smile.

"So I told myself that I couldn't change anybody, no matter how badly I wanted to. No matter how much I still want to. But I can still look after them like they were my pack. It's not hard – Marines get so close to one another that a lot of them behave like packmates without being wolves. The behaviors aren't all identical, but they're similar enough.

"Your case is harder. You've already turned your friends. I can see why you'd want to give them space, but at the same time, I can't in good conscience let things keep going the way that they have been. You've got some new wolves out there, and they barely know how to be wolves. It's not all just about knowing how to shift. It's about being a pack, taking care of one another. You're family. You need to show them that. If you want to comfort them, if you want to hug them, then you need to just do it and stop worrying about what everyone's going to think of you. You'll drive yourself crazy thinking of all the ways they might reject you when in reality I'd bet that they've been needing that comfort and guidance all along."

Hoosier stared.

"Pardon my language, sir, but you think I'm gonna make all this shit better by givin' 'em fuckin'  _hugs_?"

Haldane laughed, surprised and loud, and even in his irritated confusion Hoosier found himself fighting a smile.

"I'm not saying that it will fix everything, but I do think you should model good pack behavior for them."

"I'm not their alpha, though."

He tried not to squirm under the look that Haldane leveled him.

"Maybe not in the traditional sense," he said slowly, "But you're the closest thing they've got. Even if someone else takes point on leadership roles, they still need guidance in how to be a wolf, and you're the only one who can do that for them."

"But guidance doesn't teach instincts, and they don't pick up on half the normal shit a wolf should. They don't get bothered without the pack around, they don't need to shift, and shit, they keep getting sick. It's like when I changed 'em I fuckin' did it wrong."

Haldane squeezed his neck again, and he really had to stop doing that because Hoosier went limp like a colicky pup in its mother's hold every time.

"Well, I'm no expert on changed wolves, but like I said, it's possible that they have instincts, but don't know how to relate what they're feeling with what their instincts are trying to tell them. They might not realize that they feel anxious and irritable because they need to shift, for example. And seeing as they're adults, they might naturally have better control than a pup would, so they may not need to shift as often as we may have predicted.

"As for the rest of it...I'm sure you must know that wolves aren't impervious to disease."

Hoosier shifted uncomfortably. "Well, yeah, but-"

"I had a sister," Haldane said, cutting him off, and God, but he smiled so kindly that it didn't even bother Hoosier. "Born wolf, of course. She developed whooping cough when she was two. We thought it would be a mild case, of course – we're wolves, human illnesses don't get us down for long.

"Well, she was sick, and she just kept staying sick. For weeks she was ill, coughing hard enough that she could barely breathe. It would make her vomit, she coughed so hard. She could barely keep anything down, because every time she swallowed, it would set off the coughing again."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. In a quiet voice, he said, "Eventually the doctor figured that her lungs just stopped working. She was so little, it was too much for her. She died from it."

He looked Hoosier dead in the eyes; he felt arrested by the stare, unable to move or speak or do anything other than watch with wide, wide eyes.

"She was a born wolf, and she still died of an illness," Haldane said. "Granted, she was a pup, but she was still a born wolf. I've seen adult wolves get ill before, perhaps not seriously, but enough to keep them home for a few days. It's not at all surprising if one of yours was waylaid by an illness, especially something as serious as malaria. You have nothing to worry about, there's nothing wrong with them as wolves."

Hoosier frowned.

"You don't even know them."

"I don't," Haldane agreed, "But I know enough to make an educated guess, and I'd bet you that my guess is pretty accurate. Now, I know you've had a tough time of it, but I think we both know that it's in all of your best interest if you go back to your pack. They need you."

Hoosier looked at Haldane for a moment before his gaze slid uncomfortably to the ground, feeling far too much like a chastised child being sent by his father to go apologize to the kids he'd fought with.

Haldane stood up suddenly, his hand finally leaving Hoosier's neck, and stretched his arms over his head.

"Of course," he said slowly, "I did come out here looking to go for a run. It would be a shame to send off a potential running partner when I have so few."

The smile he gave Hoosier should have been illegal.

"Care to join me for a run, Marine?"

Hoosier had never taken off his pants in front of an officer quite so fast before.

~~~

Agreeing with Haldane that he would make changes was entirely different from confronting his friends. For one, everything was strange without Leckie there, his loss palpable.

For another, last time he checked, they were still pretty pissed with him.

When he stood in the doorway of their tent, three heads shot up to watch him.

"I'm sorry," he said, before anyone else could speak. When they all continued to stare in silence, he continued, "For everything. I'm sorry that I changed you all without your permission, I'm sorry that I didn't explain everything the right way beforehand, and that I never really explained it well afterwards either. And I'm sorry for running off these last few days too, 'cause everything was gettin' worse and the last thing you guys needed was less support around here. I'm just...sorry. I know I can't change what I did, but I can try to make things better. I wanna make things right, if you'll give me the chance."

He looked around the tent again. The silence ticked on, painfully slow, leaving Hoosier to stand alone awaiting judgment.

Of all of the reactions he could have expected, he never would have predicted Chuckler standing from his bunk, walking over, and grabbing Hoosier up into a back-breaking hug.

"You're an idiot," he said conversationally, his voice slightly muffled from where his mouth pressed against the top of Hoosier's head. "You're an idiot, and you're never going to do that again. It's bad enough without Lucky around, we can't take losing you too. No matter how stupid you are."

"It's not like there's exactly a brain trust here," Hoosier said, but he was smiling all the while, too joyously surprised by the turn of events to restrain himself.

Chuckler pulled back, but left his hands on Hoosier's shoulders so that he could look down into his eyes.

"You're right, because I've been a jackass too." He actually shifted uncomfortably, like a large, oversized kid. "I shouldn't have said what I did. I was mad, and I was scared for Lucky and Runner, but them getting sick isn't your fault. And I should never have called you those things. You aren't a monster. None of us are."

Hoosier couldn't help glancing around the tent skeptically, checking to see if the others were as surprised by this as he was. "Not that I'm complaining, but what brought all this on? Last I checked, you hated me."

Chuckler's hands dropped from his shoulders, but his expression was abashed.

"I never hated you. I just...I was mad, you know? I still am, kinda. But Sid here-" He reached out and grabbed Sid around the shoulders. "-is way too smart for his own good. He pointed out that it doesn't help being mad about something that nobody can change. He also reminded me that, well...being a wolf is actually pretty fucking cool, when I let myself enjoy it."

"You still should have asked us first," Runner interjected. "It was pretty shitty of you not to tell us what you were planning or ask our permission. But..."

He shrugged. "If I thought there was a way that I could keep all of you from getting killed? Or just to keep you all from having to go through malaria too? Yeah, I'd probably be pretty tempted to try it."

Sid and Chuckler were nodding as well.

"I've been thinking about that a lot lately," Chuckler said. "Trying to look after everybody...I realized, there's not a lot I wouldn't do if I thought it would keep you guys safe."

They were all quiet for a moment, reflecting on that thought.

"You know," Runner said slowly, "This might mean that we're all actually just really terrible people."

"Tell me something I don't already know," Hoosier drawled.

But this time, he didn't even bother trying to hold back his smile.

And then he took a page from Captain Haldane's book, and he threw his arms around Runner and Sid's shoulders.

"What do you boys say about having some hunting lessons?"

~~~

They found their way to a new sort of normal over the next few days. The changes didn't come naturally to Hoosier, and yet at the same time they sort of did. It was hard to stop curbing his behavior, to stop restraining himself from acting on impulses that he'd been suppressing for so long.

He was not a demonstrative person. He did not express affection to anyone who wasn't his parents or a dog. Or at least, that was what he'd always told himself. Convincing himself that it was okay to hug one of his packmates, or squeeze their shoulder, or to fuss over them when they were sick or injured...that was more than half of the battle (and finding ways to do so without being in full view of the company and their associated criticism was another).

What Runner came to call their "wolf lessons" made the whole transition easier, because affection for packmates and just about everything that came with being a wolf was easier when one was, well, actually a wolf. Hoosier took the boys for runs as often as he could, showing them how to track a scent, how to move without being seen or heard to avoid scaring off prey, how to hunt not only as an individual, but as a pack.

Granted, hunting rodents as a pack wasn't really an achievement, but it was a good start for people who, as of a week ago, hadn't even been on speaking terms.

Finding his footing with Chuckler again was a bit harder, because they hadn't been on truly good terms with each other since Guadalcanal. They had to relearn each other's quirks and foibles, all while trying not to intentionally get on each other's nerves as they'd done so well these last few months.

Hoosier had only once verbally broached the topic of pack leadership. He'd done so in front of the rest of the pack, so that they all had a clear understanding of how a pack was normally structured. But he also told them his feelings on that structure.

"I may have turned you all, but I don't want to be in charge. I want to look out for you, and show you the ropes, but you're my friends. We're equals."

He looked directly at Chuckler as he said, "Packs usually need someone to lead them, and that ain't me. At least, it's not all me."

It wasn't a very comfortable conversation, or one he'd ever like to repeat again, but from the way that Chuckler had nodded, his expression for once serious, it seemed like he'd understood.

And for perhaps the first time since they'd stepped foot on one of these godforsaken tropical nightmares, Hoosier had a pack, a real pack, and they had him too.

The news that Sid was rotating home was therefore extremely difficult to take. Of course they were delighted for him – he deserved it as much as any of them did, and this meant that he was going to be out of harm's way (and they all knew that they were gearing up for something big).

But it also meant that their pack would be permanently split. This was one of those things that Hoosier never properly thought through, and this time he openly admitted it.

"I honestly have no goddamn idea what's gonna happen when we're all split up back home."

He said "when," this time, not "if," because even if he questioned his own mortality, he wasn't willing to do the same for his packmates.

"We'll figure it out," Chuckler said, smiling and self-assured.

If only they could all have half of his confidence.

"That's all well and good, but I'm sayin' we don't know how hard the separation's gonna be."

"Well," Sid said, looking around at all of them with a nervous smile, "I guess we had to figure it out eventually, huh? I bet it won't be so bad. I'm gonna miss you all, of course, just like we miss Lucky now. But we'll get by, we'll write letters. It'll be fine, you'll see."

Apparently Hoosier's packmates were a bunch of unrepentant optimists.

_Well, somebody has to be._

~~~

They didn't know how long Leckie was going to be gone, and so his return was still a happy surprise.

He came into their tent with a bag over his shoulder and a smile on his face.

Christ, but it'd been a long time since they'd seen that.

"Do you know this guy?" Runner asked around his smoke.

Hoosier lounged back on his bunk, his own cigarette held lazily between his fingers.

"Mug's ugly enough to ring a few bells."

"I don't know, Gloucester, maybe?" Chuckler asked.

"Was it Gloucester?" Runner added.

"Was he on Gloucester?"

"He may have been on Gloucester."

"He looks familiar."

"Maybe he was on Gloucester," Chuckler concluded.

"I don't know, he's ugly," Runner muttered.

Leckie dumped his belongings and spun around with a grin. "Fuck you all."

Hoosier stood up and stretched, unable and now unwilling to hold back his grin.

"Looks like a land crab that once crawled up my pee hole."

And fuck it, if that didn't get an actual laugh.

Leckie's return was a flurry of laughter and shitty homemade booze and Christmas in June. He never commented on the change in the pack dynamic, but instead inserted himself into it as if he'd always been there, as if they hadn't been ragged and broken when he'd left them.

When Sid came bursting in, fresh off the excitement of running into his best friend from back home and then realized that Leckie was back, he actually tackled the other man to his bunk in a hug.

"Shoot, it's like they just let anyone in the Marines these days," he said with a beatific grin, standing up and letting Leckie move in the process.

Then he looked over at Hoosier and his smile faltered, only for a second.

"Hoos, I got a question for you," he said. "I know this is gonna sound real rich after everything that's happened with all of us, as a pack and all, but my best friend Eugene just showed up – he's the one whose letters I read to you guys sometimes. He's here now, and I'm leavin' soon, and well...he doesn't know what it's like, to be in a war. He's new, and I don't want him gettin' hurt. Seeing as I can't be here to look after him..."

He trailed off, letting them all piece together the real intent of his train of thought.

"You wanna turn your buddy into a werewolf," Hoosier said.

Sid rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, yeah. I-"

"That's a horrible idea."

"Now hold on, I'd ask him first, of course, to avoid all the problems that we had, and I'm sure I could get him to say yes, so-"

"That's not even what I was thinking about," Hoosier interrupted. "What about all the shit we've been talking about the last few days, about what it's gonna be like for you to be gone from the pack? How's he gonna feel, seein' as he's in another company and won't have anyone to show him the ropes? He's gonna get real fucked up real fast."

"What company is he even in anyway?" Chuckler asked, lighting another cigarette.

"King Company, 3rd Battalion-"

"-5th Marines?" Hoosier finished for him.

"Yeah, how'd you know? We just ran into their captain, actually, of course he walked up on us just as Eugene and I were roughhousin'-"

"Jesus Christ." Hoosier closed his eyes and shook his head. "That's not just a no, that's a  _fuck_  no, you can't turn anyone from that company. For the love of God, can you not tell that K-3-5's skipper is a werewolf?"

"What?" Sid asked, his expression dumbfounded.

Based on everyone else's confusion, he wasn't the only one.

"Since when?" Runner muttered.

Hoosier sighed loudly.

"Apparently another thing I gotta teach you guys is how to recognize another goddamn wolf. My mother would fuckin' kill me, a bunch of wolves who don't know how to recognize a wolf.  _Yes_ , Haldane is a werewolf, and if you touch one of his men he'll gut you, best friend or no."

That wasn't strictly true – actually, Hoosier couldn't really see Haldane doing that to any Marine, though he also knew that he wouldn't appreciate someone turning one of his men – but it fulfilled its purpose by causing Sid to blanch in surprise and no small amount of fear.

Apparently Haldane had made quite the impression.

"I just want Eugene to be safe," Sid said quietly.

Hoosier let out his most long-suffering sigh yet and threw an arm around Sid's shoulders.

"Look," he said quietly, "Haldane's a good guy. He cares about his men. Your friend couldn't be in better hands."

Sid shouldn't have believed Hoosier –  _Hoosier_  rarely believed Hoosier – but he nodded, his eyes wide, trusting. After all of these months, Sid wasn't the naive pup he'd been when they first met each other, not by any means. So for him to so openly trust Hoosier's judgment...

Well. It meant something.

He tugged Sid's head closer and messed up his hair.

If Sid could believe that everything would be alright, then maybe he could, too.

~~~

Despite knowing for a while that Sid was leaving, the actual experience was harder. He'd insisted that they don't have some big soppy goodbyes, which was good, because Hoosier hadn't even had one of those with his own parents and had no idea how he'd do one anyway. Based on everyone else's relieved expressions, neither did they.

"Besides," Sid said as he gave them all brief hugs, inhaling at their necks probably a bit longer than was normal for most humans. "We're gonna see each other again back home. We're pack now, right? We gotta stick together."

Of course they had no idea what that sentiment would look like back home, but they all nodded along and agreed anyway.

Sid leaving was hard, maybe because there was finality to it. There was no chance of being reunited, like in Leckie's reassignment (which had in the end resulted in very few practical changes) or his trip to Banika. They knew they would only be seeing Sid again if and when they made it back to the States.

Hoosier dealt with it his own way, taking some time alone, hunched up reading the comic that Leckie had brought him. He didn't expect to be interrupted by Sid's red-haired friend running up to him, panting and smelling of anxiety.

"You seen Phillips?" he asked.

Hoosier looked slowly to the side. "I hear the Angels are shipping out. You might catch them back down at the docks."

He resisted telling him that he was probably too late anyway. Sid had wanted him taken care of, after all.

It wouldn't do to hurt his feelings.

~~~

They reached Peleliu in September. It seemed like they had to travel halfway across the ocean to get there, and according to the maps, they sort of did. Hoosier got anxious again, being on a boat for so long, but this time, even if his packmates didn't quite share in his discomfort, he had them there to rely on when everything got too exhausting.

He tried to remind himself that as uncomfortable as he was now, Peleliu could only be worse. It was an active combat zone, and crossing the beach alone was expected to be a bloodbath.

The rumors did not disappoint.

It was every nightmare they'd expected of their landing on Guadalcanal. All of the visible island was covered in plumes of thick black smoke. Planes looped overhead dropping explosives on the incoming LVTs, destroying them on contact, and the water was frothing with shrapnel and explosives that missed their marks. Machine guns hidden in the tree line strafed the beach with fire, making it doubly difficult to cross.

And the fucking beach wasn't even the target of their assault.

Leckie was one of the gunners on their LVT, and apparently his nickname held true because he miraculously  _wasn't_  the gunner whose hand stayed tight on his gun while his body went flying in another direction. Hoosier could barely afford to get worried on his behalf, or anyone's for that matter, because so much of his immediate focus was on surviving the next five minutes.

The beach was awash with bodies and limbs, a scene which was not foreign to him, except that so many of those maimed bodies were still crying out in fear and pain, bleeding out as too few corpsmen tried desperately to put their insides back where they belonged.

He lost sight of Runner and Chuckler in the deluge of men, bullets flying everywhere and Marines doing the same. He wasn't going to let the same happen with Leckie, not if he could avoid it. As soon as Leckie finally climbed over the side of the LVT, Hoosier was there with him.

"We gotta get off the beach!"

"I know!"

"Leckie, you gotta move!" he screamed, watching his packmate still on the ground, so close to being yet another one of those many, many corpses.

"Leave me the fuck alone!" Leckie shouted, and under any other circumstances, Hoosier would scoff and tell him exactly why that was an extremely stupid statement.

Given that they weren't under other circumstances, but were currently two seconds away from getting ripped apart by the Japs, he settled for hauling Leckie up by his collar and shoving him up the beach.

It was more than a minor miracle that they made it past the beach, given the number of men who didn't. Men were dropping all around them, the lucky ones gone with a single bullet wound, the not so lucky ones left to lie there surrounded by blood and corpses on the off chance that someone might be able to rescue them.

He couldn't afford to think about them. They didn't have the  _time_  to think about them.

They entered the tree line, and pushed on.

The Japs were tucked away all around the jungle in entrenched, well-protected positions. Hoosier fired his rifle in the general direction of the shooting but had no clue if he was actually successful. Leckie, on the other hand, fired directly into a bunker dug into the ground, which brought with it a satisfying cry of pain from the enemy.

That feeling of success by proxy lasted for only seconds before a mortar shell landed right next to Hoosier, louder than anything he'd ever heard before, the blast throwing him through the air. There was a horrible pain in his right leg, a ripping, shredding sensation, and he didn't have to look to know that he'd taken a piece of shrapnel in a bad way.

Leckie caught sight of him as the smoke cleared, his eyes wide and panicked as he rushed over and threw himself down beside Hoosier while he rolled onto his back.

"Oh, Bill, Bill!" he could hear him say. It had almost a muffled quality to it after the concussive  _bang_  of the shell.

Hoosier turned to look at him, his eyes barely open, just enough to see Leckie.

"Dropped my fucking weapon," he groused, flopping an arm uselessly at his side.

In any other situation, it might have been comical.

It wasn't any other situation.

Distantly he could hear Leckie's hoarse voice screaming for a corpsman while he pressed down against the wound on Hoosier's leg. Dimly Hoosier could see a whole lot of blood spurting up over Leckie's fingers, could even smell it over all of that gunpowder, but his leg didn't actually hurt that much.

Except then he felt lightheaded, his head lolling backwards, and he thought he might pass out. That just might be too much blood, actually. He licked at his dry lips, coming back to the sound of Leckie's voice.

"It ain't shit, everything's gonna be fine."

Hoosier panted, suddenly unable to form words. His eyes kept moving of their own volition, sliding closed when he was trying to watch Leckie, to make sure that he was okay. He was screaming so much, something had to be wrong with him.

A corpsman arrived, shouting something about pressure, but at that point Hoosier didn't really feel much of anything.

"Sorry," he murmured, eyes focusing lazily on Leckie, his head lolling sideways.

"What?" Leckie asked.

Hoosier tried to repeat himself, but the sounds wouldn't come. He wanted to tell Leckie that he was sorry for everything: sorry for leaving him all alone, sorry that being a wolf hadn't protected him from the dangers of bleeding out, sorry that Leckie would have to explain what happened to the rest of the pack.

He had so much to be sorry for, really, but he couldn't even get that one word out another time.

His eyes fluttered once, twice, and then refused to open again.

"Bill?" he heard Leckie call.

It was funny, he thought. The guys never called him by his first name. The only people who ever really did were his parents.

He hoped they weren't too mad with him.

~~~

Leckie kept repeating Hoosier's name to himself, a dazed mantra as the corpsmen carried him away, took him away,  _they're going to patch him up, he'll be good as new_ , but Hoosier,  _Bill_  was his pack and he was  _gone_  and Runner and Chuckler were  _gone_  and he was all alone, so alone, and there was so much  _blood_ , Hoosier's  _blood_ , and-

He had to get up, had to keep moving. He didn't know quite where he was moving  _to_ , but staying here was not an option.

His hands were stained red and wet with Hoosier's blood, and he had to move if he wanted to do right by him and live.

( _Hoosier will be_ fine _, everything will be_ fine _, we will all be_ fine-)

Leckie made his way further inland, the only thoughts in his mind revolving around locating Chuckler and Runner, securing his pack. He could barely even recall the original objective, his thoughts were so jumbled and disjointed.

"Chuckler?" he called, seeing a tall Marine firing towards the Japs from the crater he slid into.

But it wasn't Chuckler, and he'd never heard of Chuckler or Runner, either.

He watched the Marine and his comrades leave the crater, and was about to do so in a different direction in search of his packmates when he heard a familiar voice shout his name from behind him.

"Runner!" he called, sliding back into the crater.

Runner jumped in next to him, pressing up against his side, and Leckie couldn't help taking a brief moment to breathe in his familiar scent, trying to use it to cover up the smell of Hoosier's blood on his hands,  _so much blood_.

"Are you okay?" Runner asked.

"Thirsty," Leckie replied, but Runner only hummed an agreement. Nobody had water, it seemed.

After a moment he caught Runner's eye.

"Hoosier got hit."

He could see the look in Runner's eyes, how they widened in surprise, in pain.

How they slid down to Leckie's blood-soaked hands.

This was different than Sid rotating back home. They knew that Sid was safe.

This was Hoosier, and maybe it was just his leg, but in a war like this  _just his_  anything could mean death if it wasn't treated fast enough.

And they couldn't lose Hoosier. Not after everything they'd been through, everything they'd overcome. They  _needed_  him. How else were they supposed to function as a pack, without him there to show them how? How were they supposed to stick together after the war if he wasn't there too?

He would be fine. He had to be fine.

(- _everything is_ _ **fine**_ -)

"Keep moving!" someone shouted.

That was right. They had to keep moving.

Everything would be fine.

~~~

The battle carried on into the night. They lay in a crater, watching as flares lit the sky overhead and the dull sounds of distant explosions filled the air.

Runner lay asleep next to him, somehow finding a modicum of peace in their hell. His presence was comforting, his warm scent and his slow, even breathing the only familiar thing about this living nightmare.

Sid was back home. Hoosier was injured, maybe dead. Nobody had a clue where Chuckler was or even if he was alive; by all reports, nobody had seen him since the beach.

They were all alone, their pack dwindled down to two.

Leckie didn't sleep a wink that night.

He watched the flare trail slowly overhead, bright white, almost like the fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Then, slowly, he watched it burn out, until the sky fell dark once more.

~~~

The next morning as they kept watch over the airfield, their whole reason for this godforsaken mess, Stone approached them. Naturally, he didn't have any information about Hoosier or Chuckler, and like everyone else, he didn't have any water.

Like everything in the United States Marine Corps, they were to storm the airfield dehydrated and undersupplied.

Fucking typical.

"How could they send us up here without any fucking water?"

Both Runner and Stone looked up at him.

"Lucky?"

Leckie didn't get a chance to answer Runner, because that was when the navy's planes started dropping bombs on the airfield, the sign that their offensive was about to begin.

They watched the unfolding action huddled up in the crater with their rifles at the ready, until Stone checked his wristwatch again. The magic time had apparently arrived, because Stone stood up and called out, "Listen up, we're crossing the airfield! Stand by to move out!"

When Stone called for them to move out and they crested the crater, Runner looked back at Leckie. His voice was thin, frantic as he called out, "I'll see you on the other side, cobber!"

_The other side of what?_

Leckie was too afraid to ask.

(- _everything will be fine-_ )

They ran through the Japs' shells and directly into their rifle fire. Men were crying out all around him, their bodies jerking backward as they were hit. Some fell in fine sprays of blood, nearly a mist, and others...others were just  _gone_.

There was no time to help them, no time to even think about them. Leckie aimed his weapon at the Jap gunmen and opened fire, never slowing down for a moment.

A man's leg was blown off in front of him, landing some ten feet away from its screaming owner.

(- _you are fine-_ )

He kept running, through the thick black clouds of hot dust and debris, the air gritty with it. Men were screaming all around for corpsmen, for their mothers, for whatever God might take pity on them.

(- _everyone is fine_ -)

He found Runner in the mayhem and stuck to him, refusing to be separated from another of his friends, from the last member of his  _pack_. They ran together as the earth exploded around them, an apocalyptic nightmare that none of them ever could have imagined.

(- _we will all be_ _ **fine**_ -)

And then a piece of shrapnel ricocheted into Runner's leg, sending him crashing to the ground in a cry of pain.

Leckie didn't take time to think, couldn't  _afford_  to think, and immediately started tugging Runner up by his pack, shouting, "Runner, you've gotta get up! Come on, you're alright!"

"It's my leg!" Runner yelled, his voice wrought with pain. "Hurts like hell!"

But still he stayed strong, hobbling along with Leckie's help, searching for cover, any cover, anywhere safe where he could take care of his packmate.

A mortar hit a plane in front of them, sending up a vicious fireball and another spray of debris, right before a bullet ripped into Runner's arm in another spray of blood and pain.

Runner spat and cursed as they were finally able to sit him down next to a bloodied radio operator who was calling desperately for aid.

"Runner!" Leckie called, bringing Runner's attention to him as he pulled out a roll of gauze and began wrapping it tightly around his arm. "You're gonna be fine!"

(- _everything will be_ _ **fine**_ -)

The radio operator started sputtering then, blood bubbling up thick and dark over his lips. He convulsed, almost as if he was choking on it, before he fell still and silent.

Stone, who had joined them, cursed as they found out that the radio wasn't sending out calls.

"Leckie," he said, holding out his rifle, "You gotta go back."

Go back? Go back where?

"What about Conley?"

He couldn't leave without Runner, because then Runner would be all alone, without a pack.

He couldn't leave Runner alone.

(- _we will all be_ _ **FINE**_ -)

"Get us a radio and a corpsman up here," Stone said, shaking his head desperately. "I'll stay with Conley."

Leckie stared, wide-eyed, his dry mouth agape, just trying to breathe, just trying to find a way to get his world to make any semblance of sense again.

Stone patted him firmly on the helmet.

"Okay," Leckie murmured breathlessly.

He looked at Runner, whose head was lolling now, too painfully reminiscent of Hoosier just yesterday.

(- _everyone will be_ _ **FINE**_ -)

"Hey, I'm coming back," he said urgently, "I'm coming back, do you hear me? I'm coming back! I'm coming back."

He ran out across the field, back from whence they came. Shells continued to fall all around him, exploding and filling the air with smoke and screams, too loud, far too loud. Everything was so  _hot_ , the smell of it, thick copper and burning metal and putrid flesh and  _death_ -

(- _everything will be_ _ **FINE**_ _and I am coming back_ -)

He tripped over craters and bodies, dodging flying debris from explosions everywhere he turned. A man screamed, stumbling around as bloody tissue and shredded muscle hung from where his arm used to be.

Everything was too loud, too gory, too  _much_.

He spotted a corpsman kneeling over a fallen Marine.

"Corpsman!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, desperate to be heard over the constant shelling. "Hey, corpsman!"

A shell made a direct hit, sending the corpsman and his would-be patient up in a bloody confetti of severed limbs and viscera, falling wetly to the ground around him.

There was no way, no goddamn way that he'd ever find a corpsman in all this mess. It was too disorienting, his progress too slow, and he could feel his heartbeat pounding, his breath coming in sharp pants, a burning tingle running down his spine and his nails starting to lengthen-

That was it.

As a human he wasn't fast enough, wasn't good enough, but as a wolf, as a  _wolf_ , he could run faster, see farther, hunt down a corpsman just as Hoosier had taught them to hunt down rats.

He was ripping off his clothes in the middle of a war zone before he even took his next breath.

The change had always felt somewhat uncomfortable, even if it got better after the first time, like slipping on a coat that didn't belong to him and didn't fit quite right. But this time, this time it was fluid,  _perfect_ , just the coat that he needed.

He ran, faster than he'd ever been able to on two legs, leaving his gear and his clothes and his weapons behind without a thought other than that he had to get to a corpsman, had to bring them back to Runner so that Runner would be okay, because that's what he'd promised, he'd promised Runner that he would come back-

(- _everything will be_ _ **FINE**_ _and I am coming_ _ **BACK**_ -)

He ran and ran, dodging bullets, diving over craters and between bodies, weaving through explosions like they weren't even there. His only focus was on locating a corpsman, singling out that scent of medical supplies and sulfa and tracking it down to its source.

He came upon a radio operator first, his brown coat shimmering red in the hazy golden light as he dove into their crater, barking madly.

" _What the fuck?_ " one of the huddled men screamed. Leckie paid him no heed, noticing only the radio operator, who was having no luck hailing aid.

They had no functioning radio, and they had no corpsman. They were no help to him.

With a vicious snarl he turned and climbed out of the crater, continuing his run.

He had to find help for Runner, had to make sure that Runner got home safe.

Chuckler was gone and Hoosier was gone and Sid was gone so who else did he have left?

He reached the bombed out trees, not as much victim to gunfire but still thick with shelling.

He ran towards any groupings of live Marines he could find, snarling and searching for the right scent, the one that would save his packmate's life.

A vehicle flew by, too quickly for him to spot who was on it. He ran forward, looking to give chase, looking to check out the other men over there, looking to find someone to goddamn  _take care of his packmate_ -

There was the characteristic whine of artillery flying overhead right before the whole area went up in a series of explosions and smoke, every single person there blown to bits.

The blast flung Leckie backwards, his head slamming roughly against a tree.

He yelped with the impact, slumping to the ground and rolling onto his side. He whined loudly, able to smell his own singed fur and burning flesh. He was covered in cuts, blood was dripping down into his eyes.

He tried to roll to his feet –  _he promised Runner that he would come back_  – but his body wouldn't cooperate. Every twitch made him whimper in pain, the burns bubbling and pulling, splitting open like a crisped Thanksgiving turkey.

He lay there in his defeat as his vision became hazy, and finally admitted to himself that maybe this time, everything wasn't going to be fine.

~~~

... _"Why the fuck is he naked?"..._

~~~

There were vague flashes of consciousness, not full episodes but scent memories. Light filtering in his eyes, the scent of blood mixed with antiseptics.

A hospital?

His skin was burning, burning and tingling, his head was throbbing, and he  _ached_  all over.

There was something-

He was supposed to do something-

He choked, blood spurting from his lips and splashing over his face, and he knew no more.

~~~

When he finally regained full consciousness, Leckie was in for a lot of strange looks and stranger questions.

Apparently he'd been found lying naked but alive in the middle of the battlefield, wearing nothing but his dog tags.

He may have to start going to church again, because it was a goddamn miracle that he'd managed to shift back during his unconsciousness.

He played dumb as to what had happened, insisting that he had no recollection past running to find a corpsman for his buddy.

Luckily, the doctors all had a few pet theories that they were more than willing to assign him.

He'd come in with some fairly prominent burns on his chest and legs.

"My best guess is that your uniform must have caught fire in an explosion," the doctor said. "What you have look like contact burns, so my guess is that your clothes kept you from taking the brunt of the damage, but you still had the presence of mind to get rid of them before you got burned worse."

Leckie nodded along, wide-eyed and dumb, letting the doctor feel assured in his assessment.

He didn't tell them that he was pretty sure that it was him that had been burning. He couldn't, without also telling them that he was pretty sure the tingling he felt all over his skin was his wolf healing coming into play, speeding up his recovery so that significant burns looked more like mild brushes with burning clothing.

And to be fair, he also didn't feel much like saying anything to anybody.

He'd failed.

He'd left Runner alone there, injured and in pain and without anybody to help him.

He'd left Chuckler too, alone on that goddamn island and nobody had a fucking clue if he was even still alive.

He'd left Hoosier, had no idea if the corpsmen had made it off the island with him or what state he was in.

He'd failed his friends, his pack.

He almost wished that he would heal like a normal human being, because he deserved the full pain of every wound he'd received for failing to protect his friends.

Leckie sat alone, nearly vegetative, pushing canned peaches around his tray with a slow scrape of his fork, lost in far too many memories.

"Hey Peaches, are you gonna waste those?"

Warily he turned and lifted his head. His fork dropped to his tray with a clatter.

Runner stood in front of him, his arm in a sling and a smile on his face. He smelled clean, like soap and disinfectant, and his hair was freshly washed and soft. He looked like a new man, so different from the bloody mess he'd left behind in the shadow of a bombed out plane.

"You made it?" Leckie asked in a soft, wavering voice.

"I could say the same about you," Runner said, his words thick with emotion.

Leckie looked away, suddenly unable to be the subject of Runner's happiness. He didn't deserve it.

"I tried to get you a corpsman," he said. "I tried to get back to you."

(- _I didn't come back_ -)

"I know," Runner interrupted quickly. "Lucky, I know."

He stared at Leckie long and hard, his heart in his eyes, genuine to a fault.

Runner gingerly sat down on the bench next to Leckie, wincing as he carefully stretched out his wounded leg.

"You, uh..." Runner paused, grimacing. "You hear any word about Hoosier?"

Leckie shook his head; Runner did the same in kind.

"Chuckler's still on that goddamn piece of shit island," Runner seethed.

(- _I didn't come back_ -)

Leckie continued staring ahead, unseeing.

"They left a piece of whatever hit me in my arm," Runner continued. "Guess I'll never have to buy another drink in Buffalo ever again."

That made Leckie snort in quiet laughter, if only for a moment before his thoughts dragged him back under.

(- _I didn't come back_ -)

Runner looked at him, trying to catch his eye; his own were tired, bruised, ringed with his exhaustion.

"I'm going to grab some coffee, do you want some?"

Leckie shook his head just briefly, an aborted motion.

"Can you take me topside?" he rasped. "I need some air."

Probably thrilled that Leckie said something of his own volition, Runner readily agreed.

They watched the island from the deck of the ship. It was like something from a painting, planes flying overhead dropping artillery that exploded into balls of fire, the land riddled with plumes of smoke that bled away into a bright, picturesque sky, the sun's rays breaking through white, soft clouds.

 _The Sun over Peleliu_.

Add that to a list of poems that Leckie would never write.

"Whoever's up there is getting pounded," he said.

He didn't want to think even for a moment about who could be included in that "whoever."

There was a loud clanging noise followed by steady vibration all throughout the boat.

"Feel that," Runner said around his cigarette, "They're starting the engines."

"Yeah."

Runner turned so that he could face Leckie, placing his back towards the island. The juxtaposition was intense, the clean white of Runner's shirt against the deep blue of the sea, the smoggy browns and greys of the island under siege and the bleeding red and oranges of the sky.

"Hey," Runner said.

Leckie looked at him, breathing out a plume of smoke.

"Let's go home, cobber."

He reached out his good hand, pressing it firmly into Leckie's shoulder and leaning down so that their faces were nearly touching.

"Let's go back to our pack."

"Chuckler-"

Runner butted their foreheads together playfully, the same way he would have in their fur.

"Chuckler will be coming soon, don't you doubt that for a second. And I bet you Hoosier's already on his way, and you know Sid's already waiting for us."

He squeezed Leckie's shoulder, his smile close enough to touch.

"We're going back to our pack, Lucky."

And those words, after all of the platitudes he'd heard on the ship, all of the ones he'd repeated to himself time and again in a blind hope that it would make them true, were the ones that stuck.

( _We're going home to our_ _ **pack**_ _._ )

Leckie relaxed into Runner's hand, and he smiled.

~~~

Hoosier had always been cagey about describing what, exactly, it meant to be a lone wolf.

"It's hell, okay?" he'd said, lips pulled tight in a grimace. "It's your own personal hell."

After Peleliu, Chuckler had somewhat of an understanding of what he'd meant.

He didn't know how he'd gotten separated from everyone else. One minute they were all unloading on the beach, the next it was just him and Runner, making a break for the tree line, and then...

And the he was alone.

He saw men he recognized, a few here and there. But he didn't see his friends, and nobody had any news of them.

No news was both better and worse than having news. No news meant his friends might be perfectly fine, just up around the next bend. It also meant that they may have already been torn to pieces, strewn apart across a ditch somewhere, and he would never know.

He felt like he should know. They were his friends, his pa- they were his friends.

He would know when they got hurt. Wouldn't he?

Day turned to night on Peleliu, bullets kept strafing down around him, and Chuckler had no idea if his friends were even still alive.

If he was a wolf, and he was alone, did that make him a lone wolf?

Part of him wanted to scream, or cry, or laugh, but he mostly just wanted to sleep.

God, he was tired.

Looking back, Chuckler couldn't remember much of what happened on Peleliu. It all stuck in his mind as sense memories instead of concrete scenes and events. He remembered the pounding of his heart as he ran, his breath coming out in sharp pants. He remembered the dryness in his mouth, the encroaching exhaustion, the increasingly desperate need for water. He remembered the smell of gunpowder resting thick in the air, blanketing the scent of blood and unwashed bodies.

He remembered the piece of shrapnel ripping through his thigh, sharp and burning, the pain radiating across his whole lower body until he had no idea  _what_  was missing.

He wasn't missing anything, a corpsman told him later as they wrapped his leg and hauled him onto a stretcher. He was a lucky, lucky man, that the shrapnel hit him and didn't take a huge chunk out of his leg, didn't blow his leg clean off.

He didn't think his leg had been blown off. But he did have the muddled sense memory of a different kind of burning in his leg, the same familiar tingling that shot down his spine right before he grew fur and fangs and became something that would have featured in his father's favorite horror stories.

Chuckler was no expert on medicine or on being a werewolf, but he had a sneaking suspicion that perhaps the shrapnel  _had_  taken off a bigger chunk than the corpsman suspected.

It was just that, some of the chunk was coming back.

He lay on the stretcher, staring at the grey sky clouded by the smoke of artillery and explosives, and tried not to think about much of anything for a while.

At some point as he was being lugged around like an invalid, some kid with a too-familiar accent stopped and asked how he was doing.

Chuckler stared at him, trying to place his face, trying to figure out who he was and why he gave a fuck.

The kid didn't say anything else, and the procession towards the beach continued.

Well. That was fine.

It didn't seem like anyone Chuckler cared about was left here on Peleliu anyway.

No, it was just him, and soon he would be gone too, with only the island left to know what had happened to his pack.

~~~

Lying in a hospital bed on the boat headed back towards civilization, Chuckler heard whispers amongst the men, bit and pieces of the strangest of the strange, those unexplainable things that happened in a war zone. How some men insisted that they saw a wolf dodging artillery as it ran across the battlefield. How some corpsmen had picked up a Marine who was naked as the day he was born, aside from his dog tags.

Chuckler stared at the ceiling above him, and smiled.

~~~

Hoosier came to on a ship crammed with other Marines all in various state of injury. Everyone immediately around him was still alive, but he could smell death in the air, thick and rotting. Even those who had made it to this ship weren't assured their survival.

The nurse said he wasn't in bad shape, once they'd been able to staunch the bleeding. They were confident he'd make a full recovery, given how quickly he seemed to be improving.

He honestly wasn't that worried, but he played along just enough for her to seem pleased. He asked after his pack, and he didn't have to fake the fear and concern in his eyes. It turned out that it didn't matter anyway, because she had never heard of any of them, and neither had anyone else he spoke to on the ship.

The ship unloaded all of the Marines onto Manus Island, which had only become an American base and triage hospital in the last few months after winning it from the Japanese. They were to receive care there, and await the arrival of another ship to take them back stateside.

The first thing he did was ask around about his packmates. From the looks of exasperation on all of the medical staff's faces, they were probably receiving many similar requests from just about every Marine they met.

They all responded with the same answer: they had no information, but ships were bringing in the wounded from Peleliu all the time. Wait for the next ship and try looking for your friends again.

He was allowed to walk around as long as he used a crutch and stayed off his wounded leg, and so Hoosier made the rounds after the first ship, and then the second, trying to stay out of the staff's ways while sniffing for anything that might be familiar.

He didn't find any sign of his friends, but he found a whole lot of death. There were men dying of infections, men who bled out during surgery, men screaming their pain and anguish as they had their limbs amputated.

That didn't even account for the bodies they unloaded from the ships, the men who hadn't survived the trip.

By the time the third ship came into port, he didn't bother to look. He wasn't sure he could take much more of that.

The only news that came was that a ship had arrived to take them back home, and Hoosier was scheduled to be on it.

He was too numb to do anything but acquiesce.

They put him up in a hospital in San Diego, but only briefly.

"You're making amazing progress," a doctor said with a polite smile. "Not many people are up and walking again so quickly after a wound like that. Somebody must be looking out for you."

He took a meaningful glance towards the ceiling.

Hoosier didn't follow his gaze, continuing to stare straight ahead. He didn't bother telling the man that absolutely nothing about this was a blessing. He would never understand.

He didn't have a pack, after all.

Then again, neither did Hoosier.

Not anymore.

~~~

"I haven't heard anything since. Don't even know if they're still alive," Bill Smith said, leaning back in one of the old wooden chairs surrounding the kitchen table. He ran a finger over a scratch in the tabletop, a remnant of a childhood art project gone wrong.

He jumped when his mother laid her hand across his own. Most people did that when they wanted to commiserate or show solidarity. Mrs. Smith did it casually all the time, holding her son's hand between both of her own.

"You miss them," she said.

It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

He missed them like there was a hole in his heart, dark and bottomless, never quite able to find the right thing to fill the gnawing pain.

His mother raised her thin dark eyebrows and squeezed his hand.

"I honestly wasn't expecting you to admit it so easily." Her head canted to the side, examining him carefully.

She was evidently pleased with whatever it was that she found in him, because she smiled and patted his hand again.

"You've changed, Billy, and for the better, I'd say. I always knew you'd have a pack of your own some day."

He followed her with his eyes as she stood up, giving his hand one last pat, before she collected up their long-empty mugs and brought them to the sink to wash them.

"You wanted me to take over  _your_  pack," he said slowly, as if she could have somehow forgotten her lifelong goal for him in the span of the time it took him to tell his tale.

She smiled down at the mugs in her hands as she filled the sink. Her smile went unnoticed by all but the water.

"I wanted you to have  _a_  pack," she said. "I could always tell that you had a knack for it, even if you didn't want to."

She looked back at him over a shoulder smiling softly, her hair pulled back in a neat bun at the nape of her neck.

"You're a lot like I was growing up. Did I ever tell you that?"

Bill slumped back in his seat; it creaked its mild protest.

"Sometimes," he said, because it was the truth. She compared him all the time, to her parents, to her husband, to herself. He was raised on a steady diet of stories about his similarities to his family members.

Her smile this time was his first inkling that something was different.

"Do you want to know how I knew that we would be alike?" she asked, turning back to the mugs in the sink, scrubbing them with a sponge held in worn, careful hands.

She didn't wait for his reply.

"The first day you came home with a whole posse of dogs following after you. That was when I knew, you were going to be an alpha some day. Because the same thing happened to me, just like it happened to your grandmother. If the dogs trust you to be their alpha at the tender age of six, then it's only a matter of time before the other wolves start recognizing you as a leader, too."

He stared at her in confusion, his gaze boring holes in her back as he twisted his hands in the cloth napkin in his lap.

"I'm nobody's alpha," he said.

"Yes, yes, I heard you plenty during your story, and I believe you. At least I believe that you don't  _want_ to be an alpha."

She rinsed the mugs in clean water before setting them on the drying rack and unplugging the sink.

"What we want and what we are don't always match up, though," she continued, scrubbing out the sink itself now. "I do believe that you don't want to be anybody's alpha, and I believe you when you say that your pack didn't think of you as an alpha. But I don't think that it means that you aren't one."

She rinsed the sink again, and then began drying her hands on a checkered dish towel, turning to lean against the counter so that she was finally facing him again.

"Do you want to know what I think?"

This time he didn't even bother trying to answer, because he knew that she would tell him her opinion regardless.

"What  _I_  think is that you were meant to find those boys. I think that the Lord sent you to them, to protect them, and He gave you just enough alpha instincts to make sure you could see them through whatever hardships came their way.

"But He also gave you the grace to see the strengths of others and the humility to accept when someone has you beat, and that's why you were able to tell that even if your pack needed your guidance, they needed your friend Lew's leadership too. Together, the two of you make for a strong, effective alpha."

Bill respected his mother's opinion above all others. But because he had also been listening to her give him his opinion, unsolicited and with regularity since he was a pup, he was also one of the few beings in the world brave enough to stare at her with a raised eyebrow and say, "You think  _what_?"

Mrs. Smith rolled her eyes, something that her pack would never see.

"You heard me, boy. Don't you go trying to distract me just so you don't have to talk about your problems using your words."

She came over to the table, putting her hands on his shoulders and ducking down to press a kiss to the top of his head.

"Regardless of if you're one alpha or two, that pack of yours is going to need you boys."

"I don't even know if they're still alive."

Sometimes, Bill managed to forget that he'd inherited his look of incredulity from his mother. Luckily for him, she used it often enough around him that he had frequent reminders. She'd never had much patient for bullshit.

"Well don't you think you should figure it out?"

She was his mother, but she could still make him squirm like any other misbehaving pack member when she wanted to. Maybe even more so  _because_  she was his mother.

"I never got their addresses," he mumbled. "And I don't – even if I did, what would that say about me, sending letters to their folks asking if their sons ever came back from the war 'cause I'm such a shitty friend I don't even know if they're still alive?"

"It would say that you cared. You do care, don't you?"

He knew she was goading him, playing him like a fiddle, but he still bristled at the mere suggestion.

"Of course I do. You know I do."

"Maybe I know, but do they?"

"Of course they-"

Well. Hoosier  _hoped_  his friends knew that he cared. They had to know. Everything that he'd done, all of this pain and remorse, it all started because he did something to try to protect the people he cared about. They may not have agreed with what he'd done, and he may have gone about it all wrong, but they knew he cared for them.

In fact, what he was doing  _now_  was out of care for them. He wanted to search them all out, wanted to make sure that they were still safe and alive and had made it home and were settling in nicely to civilian life. He also wanted to snatch them all up and drag them back to his family farm and keep them there indefinitely because they were a pack and packs were supposed to stick together.

But instead he was giving them their space, letting them get their lives back. He'd turned them so that they would survive a war. If he was successful, if they'd all survived –  _God_ , what a shitty packmate he was, he didn't even know – if they'd survived, then he owed it to them to let them move on with their lives. The war was over, and so the pack was over. It would be selfish of him to keep dragging them back to him, keeping himself around, insinuating himself into their lives.

They would be okay without him. They'd always done better than he had without the pack. Shit, Sid had been home for months now, he'd probably gotten over them before they'd even made it back stateside. It was cruel to try to bring himself back into their lives, to keep shoving some remnant of the war in their faces when all they wanted was to move on.

"I care," he said finally. He met his mother's eyes, solemn and fearless.

"I care. This is me showing them that I care."

"By giving up on them?"

He didn't flinch. He didn't even blink.

"By letting them go."

It didn't matter if he felt the absence of his packmates like a missing limb, or if he jolted awake at night, hands moving for a weapon he no longer had and ears straining for the sounds of a pack who were spread out across the country. A pack who no longer needed him to make sure that Japs didn't sneak up on them in the night.

If he was miserable when he realized that he no longer had anything that smelled like them, or if he spent a full moon hiding out by himself in the woods with a new mutt that had started hanging around the house, avoiding his mother's pack and desperately trying not to think about Dog...well, that was him doing right by his friends.

He was leaving them alone. He was letting them get their lives back.

He was letting them be happy.

~~~

It was pretty fucked up for a Marine to come home from the war, to get a hero's welcome and the love and adoration of his family and a date with the prettiest girl in town, and still feel like something huge was missing, something vital to his happiness and wellbeing.

But that was where Sid was at. Things had been fine at first – better than fine, perfect, the best he could imagine. It had been like one long parade of visitors and well-wishers, like Melbourne but better because these were his people, the family and friends that he'd missed for so long, and now he was home and the war was over and anything was possible.

The first morning that he woke up outside, curled up under a tree behind his parents' house, he had to admit to himself that maybe everything wasn't fine.

Maybe he was a little fucked up.

Or a lot.

It started off with little things, normal things. A joke he would go to share with one of his friends, only to remember that they weren't there anymore. Worrying about if his friends were doing okay, wondering where they were now, if they were safe, if they'd been fighting with each other again. Sometimes he'd hear a loud noise and he'd flinch, his hand automatically grabbing for a weapon he didn't have or need.

Everyone was like that, coming back from combat. That was part of serving your country in a war.

Then the itching started. At first he thought he must be covered in invisible mosquito bites, with how often he found himself scratching at his arms, his legs. It was like his skin was too hot, too tight. Ill-fitting. He felt jittery all the time, anxious, like he had to move, like something was wrong and he had to fix it but he didn't know what it was. He struggled to calm down, he couldn't fall asleep. He couldn't even eat dinner with his parents without his knee bumping up and down, and that had earned him more than a few reproachful looks.

Things just felt  _wrong_. It wasn't until a full moon months after the war ended that he figured out what it was, when he went to sleep in his own bed and woke up under the tree in his pajamas, feeling more rested than he had in months. His body knew what was wrong, even if he didn't.

Being outdoors was soothing, familiar. The sounds weren't the same as in the war – there was no fear of being killed, for one, and he wasn't surrounded by a company of Marines – but it was similar enough. Different birds, different animals scurrying around, but the same sound of wind moving through the trees, the same crickets chirping at night.

When he closed his eyes, he could pretend to himself that his pack was still there.

His eyes shot open, staring blankly at the swaying leaves overhead, the light from the rising sun just beginning to filter through.

Sid  _missed_  his pack. It felt dumb that it was so surprising, but it was true. It wasn't just that he missed his friends, because he missed Eugene plenty but it wasn't the same as this. He missed the pack, being part of something that was just theirs. He could turn into a wolf on his own, but what good was that without his packmates there with him?

Well. He had options. He had exchanged addresses with Leckie before heading home (they were the two most likely to write letters, after all). Runner might be harder to find, in a city as big as Buffalo without an address, and Chuckler being from somewhere around Chicago would be damn near impossible.

He actually wasn't sure what town Hoosier was even from, but one of the others must have gotten his address before they left. One of the guys would know how the rest of the pack was doing.

They could figure things out from there.

~~~

_Hey Lucky,_

_Boy, have I missed you guys. I never thought I would say that after how sick I got of seeing your miserable backsides on Pavuvu, but here we are. I hope everyone made it home alright. This is Sid by the way, Sidney Phillips..._

~~~

Leckie's return home was the type of event that the word anticlimactic was created for. His father reacted just as he had when Leckie left home, with a handshake and a flat expression that bordered on boredom. His mother at least gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, but then proceeded to fret about how she would  _ever_  find space for the sewing supplies that had taken up residence in his room, there was no space for them elsewhere, he'd just have to live with them.

His siblings weren't much better. It was life as usual in the Leckie household: the car needs fixing up, the bills are due, Robert comes home from the war.

He was reminded with stark clarity of why he hadn't really missed them that much. He loved his family, just maybe not being around them all the time.

(He kind of got the feeling that they felt the same.)

It was strange. The dynamic with his family hadn't changed a bit while he was away, but Leckie thought that maybe he had. He found himself missing a connection that wasn't there, a feeling of belonging, of knowing he always had a place where he was wanted.

For all that he thought himself to be a pretty intelligent guy, it took getting a letter from Sid saying,  _"You know, I really miss our pack,"_  for him to put two and two together.

That was what Runner had talked about, when they were being shipped off Peleliu: finding their pack, being a pack together. It was all mindless platitudes, had to be when they didn't even know if the others were alive at the time, but it had felt real in the moment, meaningful, the most important thing in his head.

They were a pack, and packmates stick together no matter what. No matter how long it took, no matter how fucked up they would be a pack again.

He'd kept in touch with Runner since they'd all but clung to each other on the journey home, exchanging letters so regularly that it felt like there was always something in the mailbox to greet him when he got home from work.

It was a relief, being able to hold onto that one connection, to have somebody there who understood what he'd gone through, the horror and the pain, the death, and the good parts too, curling up together in their fur, chasing each other through the woods.

Runner had acted as his rock since returning home, helping him to navigate a world that seemed to have shifted a few degrees to the left in his absence, where nothing quite made sense anymore. And he'd valued that friendship, cherished it even, but it had never occurred to him that he was missing the pack itself until that letter from Sid.

It was the first he was hearing from Sid. He hadn't heard from Chuckler, or Hoosier for that matter, since Peleliu. Leckie and Runner had stumbled into Norcross, one of the guys from How Company, in a hospital in California and he'd insisted up and down that he'd seen Chuckler back on Manus Island with the rest of the injured.

"Took a piece of shrapnel a bit too close to the family jewels," he'd said with an uncomfortable grimace, "But the docs insisted everything important was still attached."

That was the least a man could hope for his friend.

They knew Chuckler was alive, then, even if they hadn't managed to get in contact with him yet. Hoosier was another matter entirely.

He'd always been oddly cagey about discussing his life back home, or talking about what he planned to do after the war, even once they all knew that he came from a family of werewolves. Leckie had gotten the distinct impression that he didn't really expect to be seeing much of them after the war.

Well, he was the one who had made them a pack. If he didn't want to keep seeing their ugly faces for the rest of his life, he should have thought twice before turning them.

"Robert?" his mother called up the stairs. "Robert, I'm going to need your bedroom, I have to work on your sister's new dress for your cousin Maureen's wedding."

And God, did Leckie need a change of scenery.

~~~

_To my dearest little Runner,_

_How goes it in the fine city of Buffalo? I hope it can handle some visitors, because I'm not sure how much longer I can stand playing second fiddle to sewing supplies._

_I got a letter from Sid today. I'll tell you about it in a moment, but before I forget: did you ever manage to figure out where exactly Hoosier lives in Indiana?_

~~~

Runner's prediction had been correct: it didn't look like he would ever have to pay for another drink in Buffalo again. With that piece of shrapnel in his arm and a bit of a war story to go with it, people were lining up to buy him drinks.

The attention was fun, for a while. All he had to do was wear his dress uniform around town to be treated like a celebrity. His parents were beside themselves with pride, telling all their friends about their son, the war hero.

You'd think he'd dropped the bombs on Japan himself, the way they were acting.

His arm was actually sore, sometimes, not that he would ever let on about it, outside of his letters to Leckie. It was all well and good to show off that you brought a piece of the war home with you, but when it turned into a disability, when it made reaching up to grab things painful, or when sometimes your whole arm spasmed and trembled like all of your muscles had seized up at once – nobody wanted to hear about that. That made you an invalid. A tough Marine coming back from the war couldn't be an invalid.

Then you weren't a hero, you were something to be pitied. The guys that sacrificed the most were the ones who had the hardest time coming home.

So Runner kept his mouth shut. He had it easier than most, anyway. He'd healed up better than the doctors had expected, had regained more range of mobility in his arm.

"Must be all that running you did in school," his dad had said with a proud smile. "A natural born athlete, of course your body knows how to fix itself up."

Or he was actually a werewolf with enhanced healing abilities that had kept him from bleeding out way before he ever received medical attention.

Either or.

Though it was uncomfortable, the shrapnel wasn't debilitating when it was in his arm. It had made him wonder, though, what it would be like to shift with it there, when his body reshaped itself and the shards of metal were then lodged in a front leg.

Shifting felt strange. Well, it had always felt strange, but it felt  _different_ , now.

Maybe it was because Runner was on his own when he had only ever done this with the pack before. Maybe it was because he was his bedroom in his family home instead of out in the wilderness somewhere where one might expect to find a large predatory mammal.

Or, maybe it was because he had a chunk of metal stuck in one of his limbs that didn't used to be there.

It didn't hurt, at least, when he shifted. The movements felt awkward, less natural than the last few times he'd done it. It felt like he needed to concentrate more to bring the shift on, like he had to use effort to trigger it.

(Thankfully he didn't think it was possible to get stuck halfway, because he didn't even want to contemplate what that would be like.)

He could feel the shrapnel in his leg now, sore like a bruise, but not so bad that he couldn't stand. When he took a few steps across his room...

Well. He probably wouldn't be doing much running as a wolf any time soon, unless he wanted his hobbling gait to send him directly onto his face.

He'd have to practice.

Of course, there wasn't really a good place to practice running around as a wolf with a limp in a city like Buffalo. Delaware Park was an option, though that might make people think he had somehow escaped from the zoo, and he'd really rather avoid that media frenzy.

Maybe Leckie was right about that overdue visit, but perhaps Buffalo wasn't the best place to have it.

Runner knew that Hoosier lived in Loogootee, Indiana. Hoosier probably didn't remember that he'd even mentioned it, seeing as he'd told Runner back when they first met each other, but Runner had a good memory for detail, at least when it came to his friends. He remembered the important parts: birthdays, favorite type of liquor, hometowns. The ones that any good friend would know.

Plus, there was no forgetting a town with a ridiculous name like that.

Leckie would be up for a bit of a trip. Sid, too, from what he'd said in his letter to Leckie (who had passed on Sid's address in his own letter). Which just left...

~~~

_Chuckler,_

_Maybe the next time you almost get your balls blown off, you could remember to drop your address off with your buddies first? I had to send this to the Marine recruiting station in Chicago and ask them very nicely to pull up your records and forward this to you. It's going to be very awkward if this doesn't reach you and someone else opens it. You should have thought about that before disappearing on us._

_I've been writing letters with Lucky, and he's been talking to Sid. We've decided that we need to take a little vacation..._

~~~

Chuckler actually sunk to his knees right there next to his mailbox when he read Runner's letter, so overcome with relief that he was choking back tears.

He hadn't heard anything about his friends since Peleliu. It was his own damn fault, never making sure he had everyone's information so that they could keep in contact, and a part of it was the general chaos of the United States military. He had to rely on word of mouth for updates on his friends, and if nobody else knew anything, he was shit out of luck.

He'd been waiting on tenterhooks since he got home, unsure of how to reach out to his friends in the first place and terrified he'd receive a letter in return from their parents telling him the bad news.

Chuckler knew that at least one of them had survived, because he would bet all the pay he'd ever received from the Marines that the strange naked man picked up on Peleliu had also been the wolf spotted running through the battlefield.

He also knew that that wolf had to have been Leckie or Runner, because he'd met up with Turner on Manus Island and learned that Hoosier had been hit during the opening assault.

"He was in a bad way," Turner had said, uncharacteristically quiet as he shook his head. "I saw the corpsmen trying to patch him up so they could get him to safety. He was just bleedin' all over the place."

He'd looked up at Chuckler then, a miserable frown on his worn, bruised face.

"I don't know what happened to him after that. I'm sorry. He's a good man."

Chuckler had felt the words like ice in his veins, cold and sharp and cutting to the bone.

Hoosier wasn't dead. Nobody was saying he was dead. There was a good chance he was still alive, if Turner had seen him getting medical treatment.

But there was also nothing to say that he hadn't died. Not if Turner saw him bleeding out, and nobody had seen him since. Plenty of people died on that island, good men, bad men, medics, chaplains, Marines, Japs. The only thing that anyone was sure of at this point was that nothing was safe, not in the Pacific.

They'd already learned that wolves were fallible, that even an illness could get them down. Hoosier had said from the start that being a wolf wouldn't save you from a bullet, wouldn't save you from blood loss.

He just might be dead.

Chuckler had already been lying on a painfully flat hospital bed for that conversation, which was probably for the best, or he likely would have fallen over.

Things had been getting back to normal, between the two of them. Things were  _good_. They were friends again, they were a pack, and-

And Chuckler finally got why Hoosier had done it. He'd had an idea, before, enough to begin forgiving him, but now, for the first time, he understood why Hoosier had wanted to turn them all into werewolves.

Chuckler's leg was burning and tingling in turns, but it was knitting itself back together. The corpsmen thought he could have severed an artery, he could have had his leg amputated if he didn't bleed out first, but instead he'd made it through and his body was literally repairing itself.

Being a wolf was probably the only thing that had saved him. Hoosier had done that for him, given him that chance. Chuckler still didn't like that he'd never been given a choice, that he'd had his own fate decided for him, but he couldn't be sorry that Hoosier had helped him survive.

Chuckler was going to make it, and at the same time, Hoosier might already be dead.

Those words had been bouncing around his head for months. They were always there in the back of his mind, lurking in all that he did, the thought that Hoosier may have died while Chuckler survived and he'd never be able to settle things between them, once and for all, never let Hoosier know that he forgave him, that he understood.

It had been worse, not having updates on the others, not knowing who had made it out or what shape they were in. Chuckler's instincts seemed to sit close to the skin, always there underlying whatever he did. He had to stop himself from growling at people who pissed him off, or from responding to the slightest of noises as if he was ready to hunt and give chase. He found his eyes tracking every scene looking for threats – and for his pack. He knew they wouldn't be there, but that didn't stop some instincts he didn't understand from making him seek them out all the same.

It was wrong, not having them around.

Runner's letter was the first thing in a long time that had felt right.

They still didn't know if Hoosier was alive. They had no clue if he would have returned to Indiana after the war even if he did survive.

But it was their only hope, and it was a place to start.

Chuckler wasn't the best writer, but he grabbed up a pen and a few sheets of paper all the same.

He had some letters to write.

~~~

Life was painfully normal on the Smith family farm. At times Bill felt like he'd walked into some sort of alternate universe where the war had never happened, because things felt eerily the same as they had before he'd left.

In some ways he supposed that should be comforting. So many guys were afraid that they'd come back from the war to find that everything they'd loved had moved on without them. He should be happy, to be able to walk right back into his old life and pick up where he left off.

He couldn't, though, and that was the problem. There was no way for him to shuck off his time in the military and go back to just being Bill Smith, the alpha's son who worked on the family farm, not when so much of him felt like Hoosier, the Marine who'd made his own pack and killed Japs. His old life may not have changed, but he had.

Trying to fit himself back into the mold of his old life was like trying to fit into a pair of shoes that had been outgrown, uncomfortable and clearly wrong.

Bill knew his parents could tell. They'd always been able to read him, even when he tried to keep things from them – maybe especially when he tried to keep things from them. He'd seen the looks they gave each other over the dinner table, the raised eyebrows, the meaningful nods.

They both had their own ways of going about it with him. His father would drag him around on farm chores and make a lot of leading comments about how Bill could talk to him about anything, really,  _did you know the Martins' boy was in the Navy, they say he's been having a hard time of it since he came back, it probably helps to talk about these sort of things, don't you think?_

His mother was much more direct.

"Billy," she said as she pulled a pie crust from the oven, "I love you, but you're being an idiot."

He paused in what he was doing, whisking sugar with flour in a bowl at the counter, and closed his eyes and sighed.

"Ma..."

"Did I tell you to stop?" She swatted at him with a kitchen towel until he started whisking again.

When she was satisfied with his progress, she continued, "I know you aren't happy. And I'm sure your father took you out to fix that fence in the pasture and gave you a whole speech about sharing your feelings, because that's what works for him, bless him. But I think you're a bit more like me and you need to hear it straight: you aren't happy because you miss your pack, and you need to stop moping around this old farm and find them."

He put the whisk down and stared at her.

"Ma, we talked about this. I don't know where they are. I don't know where I'd even send a letter to. I don't know if they're still alive, and even if they are, I don't know if they'd want to talk to me – shit, I don't know  _why_  they'd want to talk to me."

His mother rapped him once on the knuckles with the whisk as she took it up and started adding more ingredients to the bowl.

"Language," she growled, lowly enough to have him muttering apologies. "And that's why I said you're bein' an idiot about this. If they're pack, I'm sure they care just as much as you do."

She started adding cream to the bowl. "Go find the vanilla, will you?"

He did as he was asked, searching through the jumble of bottles and jars in the pantry, the labels all scratched and worn and half-illegible.

"It was just for the war," he told a bottle of vinegar, wrinkling his nose at the smell as he moved it aside. "They have lives, they want to move on."

He finally spotted the vanilla and grabbed it up, turning around to find his mother staring at him, her hands on her hips.

"Well how in the world would you know that? Did you ask them?"

"Ma-"

"So you didn't ask them."

_"Ma-"_

"If you didn't ask them, how would you ever know what they want? For all you know, those boys are lookin' for you right now. I'm sure they're missin' you, another member of their pack and all."

She plucked the vanilla from his hand and turned back to the bowl.

"It's just not right," she grumbled, "Being apart from your pack like that."

Bill crossed his arms and leaned back against the counter next to her.

"I was away for over two years."

His mother paused in her actions to turn and look him in the eyes.

"And it felt horrible and unnatural and I missed you every day," she said, her voice serious and firm.

Bill couldn't help ducking his head in an effort to hide his flush.

"Your father, too," she continued, returning to the mixture in the bowl. "That man has never spent so much time out in the barn talking to the cows."

Now Bill winced.

"He was talkin' to the cows?"

It was a known fact in his family that his father had a tendency to share his concerns with the dairy cows when something was bothering him, mostly because they were dumb as the cud they chewed and could stand there for hours listening without walking away.

"Mhmm. And that was just 'cause the hens got sick of him. We all missed you – the pack too, even though I'm sure you probably didn't miss them."

Bill kept his mouth shut, because they both knew that answer.

"Packmates care about each other, that's what makes them a pack," his mother said. "And I'm sure yours are no different, war or no war."

He was about to respond explaining for the tenth time why that was wrong when there was a loud knock on the door.

Bill exchanged glances with his mother; she sighed.

"Lord give me strength, but if that's Gloria come to complain about the Hansen pups trampling her flowers  _again_..."

She pushed the bowl back towards Bill. "Pour that in the crust and pop it in the oven, will you? I need to go practice my diplomacy."

 _Practicing diplomacy_  was how his mother referred to "dealing with the endless piles of bullshit heaped on her by her overly needy pack." Gloria was a case in point for why Bill wanted nothing to do with being an alpha.

He was scraping out the bowl as he heard the door open, and was just about to sprinkle nutmeg on top of the pie when the wind blew through the doorway and carried with it a series of scents that made him freeze in place, back straight, eyes wide.

 _Summer, warmth, dirt, oil, gunpowder, smoke, sweat, leaves, rain, jungle, ocean,_ pack.

Bill dropped the nutmeg, the little jar rolling across the countertop with a clatter, and made his way into the hallway towards the door.

With the sun shining in brightly behind them, he couldn't even see who was in the doorway, but it didn't really matter because a moment later he was being slammed down on his mother's hardwood floors and pinned by a warm, heavy weight.

He had the wind knocked out of him, which wasn't really helping him to gather his bearings. Neither was the voice in his ear shouting, "Hoosier!"

Strong arms grappled around his sides and manhandled him into a hug, right before another weight slammed into them and shoved Hoosier back to the floor.

"Damn it, Runner, I said help him up, not dog pile him."

"It's a wolf pile," said a muffled voice somewhere near Hoosier's head, "Because we're wolves."

There was a whining noise from somewhere above him, and then the two weights on top of Hoosier were hauled back enough that he could finally see daylight and breathe fresh air again.

He blinked a few times to adjust his eyes to the light, only to find Leckie peering down at him with a ridiculous smirk, each hand occupied holding either Runner or Chuckler by the collar of their shirt. Sid was standing at Leckie's shoulder, looking sorely tempted to replace the other two on top of Hoosier.

"What the hell?" Hoosier muttered, feeling breathless for more than just having been slammed to the floor.

"You jackass," Chuckler snarled, right before Hoosier was dragged right back into his arms. This time they were at least sitting upright, and Hoosier knew who had him in a bear hug.

It was just more confusing  _because_  Hoosier knew who had him in a bear hug and was currently nosing at the hair behind his ear and making telltale snuffling noises.

"What the hell?" Hoosier repeated.

" _Language_ ," he heard his mother reprimand again, but when he sought her gaze over Chuckler's shoulder, her eyes were bright and she was smiling like she could burst with happiness.

"I'm just going to make sure that pie got in the oven," she said, looking far too pleased to be literally throwing her son to the wolves.

"There's pie?" Runner was far too food-motivated.

"Sugar cream pie," Mrs. Smith said with a wink. "It's an Indiana specialty."

Runner stared after her like he'd just found God.

Hoosier would have made a remark, but he was too busy being caught up in Chuckler's arms and absolutely baffled as to how he got there.

"What are you all doing here?" he asked, even as an unconscious hand came up to rest between Chuckler's shoulder blades, rubbing slowly along his spine the way that Haldane had done it for him all those months ago on Pavuvu. "How did you even find me?"

"Well it's not like you made it easy," Runner grumbled, settling for leaning against Hoosier's side right there on the floor instead of battling Chuckler for a chance to hug him. "I was the only one who even knew the name of your ridiculous town. After we got here, though, it was just a matter of asking where the Smith family lived. Everyone knows who you guys are, but I guess that makes sense, because I'm pretty sure some of them were wolves, actually..."

Another warm weight settled against Hoosier's other side, a head nestling in against his shoulder, and he could tell by smell alone that it was Sid.

"I didn't think you would look for me," Hoosier muttered in a low voice.

"No shit," Leckie laughed, his smile still far too bright. "We noticed from the way that you didn't give us an address or anything to go by."

"The war is over."

Runner poked him sharply in the side.

"We know, we listen to the news. The Japs lost, America won, everyone had a great time. Except we couldn't celebrate with our pack because nobody had a clue what anyone else was up to."

The hand that had been fisted in the front of Hoosier's shirt clenched tight and he could hear Chuckler breathe out a little growl right next to his ear.

"We didn't even know if you were  _alive_."

Hoosier sighed and closed his eyes, pulling Chuckler more firmly into his own grip.

"I could say the same for all of you. I didn't have a fucking clue what happened after I got hit."

"Neither did we," Runner grumbled, "We were fucking terrified for you, nobody saw you after the corpsmen carried you off."

Sid made a little whining sound and pushed himself closer to them. "Imagine being me, getting all my news from the paper and the radio. I was so afraid one of your names was gonna come up in the casualty lists."

Hoosier moved a hand from Chuckler's back and held it out to him; Sid grabbed it in his own and squeezed tightly.

"Christ, we're all pathetic," Leckie sighed, even as he finally gave in and joined them on the floor. It was getting a little cramped, given that the hallway wasn't that wide, but nobody seemed that bothered.

"Speak for yourself," Runner mumbled, like he wasn't blindly nuzzling in between the vicinity of Chuckler's head and Hoosier's shoulder.

Hoosier was silent, letting himself take the moment in, cataloguing it. His pack was here, warm and safe and whole, at his parents' home in Indiana. They'd tracked him down, even without a solid address, traveling from all over the country just to find him. And now here they were on the hallway floor, crowded in around him like overtired pups, and  _Chuckler_  of all people was clutching at him like a security blanket.

Taking a page from his mother's book, he just came out with it and said, "I don't understand what's going on right now."

"You're an idiot," Sid said, sounding so cheerful that Hoosier couldn't help loosening his grip on Chuckler so he could turn and stare incredulously at Sid. Damn, the pup was growing up.

"I've been hearing that a lot lately."

Chuckler snorted loudly, a warm puff of air against his chest.

"That's surprising."

He pulled back enough so that he could actually see Hoosier's face again. Whatever he saw there made him smirk and shake his head.

"You really don't get it, do you?"

He waited for a moment, and when Hoosier said nothing, he continued, "We're pack, Hoos, of course we came to see you. We were worried about you, we didn't even know if you'd made it out, and this was the only way to make sure you were okay."

"Besides," Sid added, "Pack's supposed to be together anyway."

Hoosier looked between Chuckler and Sid, and then his gaze trailed to each of his friends in turn.

"You really mean that," he said, shaking his head softly in disbelief. "You really want to be a pack? Still, after all this?"

When he got to Leckie, the man just smirked and held up his hands.

"I'm only here because my bedroom's been commandeered for sewing," he said, still smiling like an idiot. "But I guess I'm here for the pack too. What, you didn't think you got to be rid of us just because the Japs surrendered, did you?"

"You  _are_  an idiot," Runner said, sounding far too gleeful for someone who was petting at Hoosier's hair right now.

"But you're our idiot," Chuckler added, patting Hoosier on the cheek like he was a particularly slow pup. "So we'll forgive you for your stupidity. You made us a pack, buddy. You made us  _your_  pack. You're stuck with us for life."

For a moment, Hoosier wondered if this was all just some sort of strange dream his brain had cooked up to torment him, because he was surrounded by his friends and  _Chuckler_  was talking about the meaning of pack.

His confusion must have shown in his expression, because Chuckler laughed a little and ducked his head, a chagrinned look on his face.

He met Hoosier's eyes through his lashes and whispered, "I understand now why you did what you did. You did it the wrong way, but you did it because you love us. I can see that now, and...I forgive you."

Maybe Hoosier was the one grabbing Chuckler up in an embrace this time, and maybe his eyes were burning a little, but it wasn't like any of his packmates could comment because the moment he pulled Chuckler back into his arms there were three other wolves piling in around them in a warm, heavy hug.

He didn't know how long they stayed like that, clutching onto each other like they might be swept away by some unseen current if they dared to let go for even a moment, but it was long enough that he could start to smell the pie caramelizing in the oven.

"How is this going to work?" he mumbled around a mouthful of what was probably Sid's hair. "You all have jobs, and families-"

"Pack is family," Sid said quickly, poking at Hoosier's ribs. "That means you're family, too."

And if that didn't make Hoosier's chest tighten with more than just the weight of his friends' hugs.

"But I'll hold you back," he said, "You have – responsibilities, and  _lives_ , and I-"

Someone flicked him sharply in the side of the head.

"Hey, buddy," Chuckler said, "No matter what happens, no matter how far apart we are, we're still always gonna be your pack, and there's nothing you can do to change that. So you better just get used to us, 'cause we're gonna be around a whole lot more from now on."

"Especially if all of your mom's cooking smells like that," Runner added, craning his neck in the direction of the kitchen.

Hoosier swatted at him, dislodging Chuckler, who then growled. Runner shoved back at them, pushing Leckie in the process, and soon the group hug had dissolved into one big wrestling match, everyone rolling around on the floor snarling and shoving like pups in the middle of Mrs. Smith's freshly cleaned hallway.

Mrs. Smith stood in the doorframe of the kitchen peering out at them, and smiled.

She'd been right about at least one thing: her son had found himself a pack who loved him just as much as he loved them.

She was right about something else, too, something she'd told her husband back when their son had first announced his plans to enlist in the Marines and go to war.

"You know," she'd said, all those years ago, "He's going to be alright. He's going to go out and find himself and discover something he's passionate about. When he comes back he'll be a changed man, but some of that change will be for the better."

Her husband had lowered his paper and stared at his wife with raised eyebrows.

"You're awfully optimistic."

"No," she'd said, smiling primly, "A mother just knows these things."

As she watched her boy and his packmates roll around on the floor like pups, she couldn't help but applaud herself for her intuition.

She had just turned to reenter her kitchen and check on her pie when she froze in her steps.

Without turning around, she ground out, "Bill Smith, don't you  _dare_  bump into that vase, young man! You boys take it outside or not a single one of you will be getting even a  _bite_  of this pie!"

The sounds of roughhousing stopped, and then, with guilty haste, the group of vicious Marines fled out the front door and towards the woods, shouting epithets and shoving at each other the entire way.

Mrs. Smith smiled to herself.

Sometimes, a mother just knew.

**Author's Note:**

> I know that in real life the guys all met up before going home (Leckie and Runner found Hoosier on Manus Island and then they all found Chuckler in California) but in real life they also weren't werewolves, so I took some liberties in the name of angst.
> 
> An alternative title for this story, based on a comment by bluecamellia, is "Five Fucking Wolves in a Hole in the Ground."
> 
> If you ever want to chat about this fic, you can find me over [here](https://armypeaches.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


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